The route for the 2022 Vuelta a España can be summed up simply in the old adage, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

After the mountain festivities of last year's final week of the Vuelta, the second week of 2022 looks to be the toughest stage, with three serious summit finishes in four days in Malaga, Jaen, and the Sierra Nevada.

However, stage 20 of the Vuelta, which passes through the Sierra in Madrid with a summit finish in Navacerrada, is famous for big surprises, as Tom Dumoulin lost to Fabio Al as recently as 2015.

Other highlights of the 2022 edition include three stages of the Grande Paire in the Netherlands, originally scheduled for the 2020 edition, and Utrecht will be the first city in history, after the Tour de France in 2017 and the Giro d'Italia in 2010, to host all three Grand Tour city to host a stage.

Also, 2022 will be the second year of the race without the Pyrenees and Angliru.

In addition, media predictions that a full tribute stage to Alejandro Valverde would be held in his retirement year were completely off the mark. A single stage start in his hometown of Murcia was the only direct tribute to the Vuelta's only Spanish star, who also unexpectedly disappeared from the race presentation.

However, as was foreseen, the Vuelta will return to Madrid for the final stage after finishing in Galicia last year, and in keeping with the Vuelta's tendency to explore new terrain, at least five of the nine summit finishes will be entirely new terrain.

As already widely reported, the 23-km middle-distance team time trial through the streets of Utrecht should be the first reference point for the GC favorites, and the sprinters will get two chances to shine on the flat terrain of the central Netherlands before returning to Spain.

Then comes stage 5, two days of racing through the Basque Country before an unprecedented summit finish on the summit of Pico Jano in neighboring Cantabria.

The first likely showdown, though, will be the two Asturian stages on the second weekend. A new difficult climb in Corrado Funkuaya and a series of summit finishes in Les Prelaces, where Simon Yates took control of the race in 2018, will help define the GC picture of the Vuelta.

After the opening TTT, the second day's challenge for climbers comes shortly after moving south and east to Alicante.

But a trio of Andalusian high mountain stages a few days later will put the ball back in the climbers' court.

While not extreme, the first summit finish on stage 12, Peñas Blancas overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, is very long, and the coastal winds could create gaps. And the climb to the better-known Sierra de la Pandera and, above all, the endless climb to the Sierra Nevada 24 hours later (preceded by the brutally difficult Hazariñas climb) could be the most aggressive mountain climb in the entire Vuelta.

Predicting how the third week of racing will affect the overall outcome of the Vuelta is tricky at best. While the western Andalucía flat section of stage 16 is straightforward, the ensuing series of summit finishes at Monasteria de Tentudo and El Pional are both unprecedented, and in remote parts of Spain that the Vuelta rarely visits.

Stage 20 is familiar terrain for this race, with a summit finish in Navacerrada and a run through the Sierras of Madrid. Further back in history, Isidro Nozal's loss of the Vuelta to Roberto Heras and Robert Millar's domination of the "Spanish Armada" in 1985 are classic examples of the Vuelta's script suddenly being rewritten in the same mountains.

In any case, after last year's "experiment" of a final time trial (which actually changed nothing), the 2022 Vuelta route will return to its usual scenario of multiple summit finishes, with great potential for ambushes and surprises. From a fan's perspective, this has rarely proven to be a bad thing.