The route for the 2022 Vuelta a España (open in new tab) will finally be announced on Thursday, clearing up quite a few questions about cycling's third Grand Tour of the season.

The key points of the Vuelta, the last of the three Grand Tours for which a route is announced each year, are more or less finalized weeks before the curtain rises on the race presentation, and longtime cycling commentators Carlos de Andres and Pedro Delgado straddle the stage to show off all the details. But this year's Vuelta organizers have managed to keep the 2022 route under wraps, at least for now.

Aside from the Grande Pearl in the Netherlands, a tough first week of mountain racing in the northern Basque Country and Cantabria, and a return to the traditional finish in Madrid, only a handful of other stages have been revealed.

What will be missing from the route is that for the second year in a row, a stage in the Pyrenees is likely to be missed, and a return to the northwestern region of Galicia, the site of the finish in 2021, is highly unlikely. The same goes for a return to the far-flung Canary Islands, which have been planned for decades but seem to have been quietly forgotten once again this year.

Undoubtedly included in the 2022 route, however, is a Grande Pearl in a foreign country. [The Vuelta 2022 will kick off with a mid-distance team time trial in Utrecht on Friday, August 19, two years after a pandemic forced the Netherlands not to host the 2020 edition. Two more stages are scheduled in the Netherlands, both of which are flat and will conclude with a group sprint. On the rest day immediately following the opening weekend, the Vuelta Peloton moves to the Basque Country for three hilly stages.

The fifth stage will then take place in Pico Haina in neighboring Cantabria. It is approximately 13 km long, but the average gradient is a relatively gentle 6.4%. Along with the team time trial in Utrecht, Pico Haina will be the early selection stage for the GC riders in the 2022 Vuelta.

However, the GC challenges that follow will come quickly as the Vuelta heads west to the Picos of Europa mountains after a weekend in Asturias. This weekend is rumored to include at least one, and possibly a second, mountain challenge.

Saturday could finish with a steep but short climb to Los Praires, where Simon Yates took his second decisive race lead in 2018, but there are also rumors of a return to Angliru that day. And on Sunday, another major set-piece battle may unfold in the all-new Asturian mountain, Corrado Funkuaya.

In the second week of racing, the Vuelta heads south, where the details become very sketchy. Mid-week there is likely to be a punchy mountaintop finish near Portugal at El Piornal in the rarely visited western Extremadura region, and there will undoubtedly be another important uphill stage to Peñas Blancas overlooking the Mediterranean coast.

The decisive third week as the Vuelta heads north and back to Madrid includes more gaps.

Alejandro Valverde (Movistar) is likely to begin his final year as a racer in his hometown of Murcia, with a hilly stage scheduled between Elche and Alicante.

Race director Javier Guillén said that the 2022 Vuelta will feature an individual time trial "at some point," but gave no further details.

What is more certain is that last year's event will return to Madrid, its traditional finish point, on September 11, after finishing in Santiago de Compostela. And on Thursday, in the Spanish capital, the blanks on the Vuelta map and stage list will finally be revealed.