Sonder Santiago Rival 22 Grand Tourer

The Sonder Santiago Grand Tourer is the British company's big-mile-eating machine. It's based around a neatly finished Reynolds 631 steel frame and both the fame and the steel fork are fully festooned with all the fixtures and fittings you need. Our model comes with mudguards, a rear rack and a Brooks leather saddle. But old-school steel is paired with mechanical disc brakes and its geometry is modern too, so the handling is quite lively. It's practical, comfortable and well equipped, though I'd have liked a lower bottom gear.

You'll find more options in our guide to the best touring bikes.

> Buy now: Sonder Santiago Grand Tourer for £1,849 from Alpkit

Sonder Santiago Grand Tourer: Ride

Steel frame, wide – or wide-ish – tyres and good contact points and what do you expect? Comfort. And that's exactly what you get. (I should say I did most of my testing using a Fabric saddle rather than the Brooks leather saddle specced, but more on that later.)

> Steel appeal: find out why bike makers and riders still love steel bikes

Compared with a traditional steel tourer, the Sonder Santiago has a shorter wheelbase, a slightly steeper head angle and a shorter head tube. For example, both the Surly Disc Trucker and Ridgeback Voyage have longer wheelbases, more relaxed head angles and taller head tubes – much taller in the case of the Surly. This helps to make the Sonder's handling decently lively too, and the Santiago isn't that heavy for a tourer, some of which reach 15kg or so.

This meant it was an absolute treat travelling with just a single lightly filled pannier on both my former commutes – the 16 miles from Bath to Bristol mainly on the Bristol Bath bike path, and the 12 miles from Trowbridge to Bath largely on the canal towpath.

The handlebar also contributed to very good handling over different surfaces, measuring 40cm from centre to centre at the hoods, but flaring out to 46cm at the drops. This lets you ride on the hoods on the road in a comfortably and reasonably narrow position – go aero! – while the extra width comes into its own when you venture off road, when it offers you greater control.

While I liked the Grepp handlebar tape, I'd probably go for something plusher still for touring, where I prefer as much padding as possible.

It's a pretty decent climber, too. Unloaded you can get out of the saddle, with the compact frame stiff enough to cope with the extra torque. Load it up and you'll be spinning in the 32x32 bottom gear, though there were times I'd have liked an even lower gear (a theme that I'll return to!).

It descends confidently, the just-over-a-metre wheelbase making it pretty lively, though as it only has cable-actuated disc brakes, your hands and wrists will be working quite hard to stop you safely.

I haven't used the Goodyear County tubeless-ready tyres before, but like Jez who tested the Ultimate version, I was impressed.

They grip well on road, thanks to their slick central strip, and they have squared-off shoulder blocks for gravel and off-road use. You won't want to take them on full-on mountain bike routes, but for gravel trails, fine gravel surfaces, singletrack and broken roads they're just the job.

Their 35mm width is a good compromise between comfort, protection and weight – and they come with a layer of puncture protection too, which is absolutely crucial when you're touring.

Also, not only are they tubeless-ready, but Sonder will set them up as tubeless for you for £44.99. Although even with inner tubes fitted, their 120tpi construction means they're reasonably supple.

Overall I found the Sonder spot on for day-long rides over smooth roads, poor roads, towpaths and unsurfaced tracks, delivering very good comfort and control.

Sonder Santiago Grand Tourer: Frame and fork

It's a mixture of the classic and the modern when it comes to the Sonder Santiago – the old school comes in the form of a steel frame and fork. But it's all TIG-welded in the Far East rather than lugged and brazed in a British workshop.

The frame isn't made from Reynolds 531 either, but from one of its more modern offspring – Reynolds 631, an air-hardened steel 'made for Reynolds in Germany from 100% recycled raw input scrap'. And being steel, it can be recycled again – though hopefully not in my lifetime...

Other modern features a long way from my first tourer in the 1980s include the fact that both the frame and fork are built for thru-axles to make the most of the bike's disc brakes.

You get a full range of fixtures and fittings, with top tube bento box bosses about the only absentee. The main frame gets three pairs of bottle cage bosses, with one pair under the down tube, while the influence of bikepacking shows in the boss-emblazoned fork.

The frame has fittings for a rear rack and both the frame and fork have mudguard mounts, with our Grand Tourer version of the Santiago coming with a rack and guards out of the box. You can also get a naked version of the Santiago, the Touring, for £1,649 and spec it with your own guards and rack.

It's a pretty compact frame and the geometry is a bit tighter and more aggressive than you might expect from a tourer, but there is room for plenty of rubber at each end, which you're going to need if you're taking this far and wide.

Sonder says there is clearance for 47mm tyres if you're running 650B wheels or 37mm with 700C, but our test bike has 35mm tyres and full-size mudguards and I reckon you could go a little wider than 37mm.

It's not unusual for a tourer of this size to have a wheelbase 106cm long or so – not the Santiago. Our frame nudges itself over a metre but only by a fraction to 1,006mm, which makes it more like a light tourer or audax bike than an expedition machine. The 72-degree head tube angle may be a degree slacker than you'll find on a road bike, but it's pretty aggressive for a tourer.

Sonder Santiago Grand Tourer: Finishing kit

Rather than the more familiar Shimano, Sonder has gone with SRAM Rival for this version of its Santiago, though it is available in 1x and 2x setups with either SRAM or Shimano groupsets.

If you're not familiar with SRAM's shifting system, it looks similar to Shimano's at first glance but is different in quite a few ways – the outer lever doesn't double up as a gear lever but is just a brake lever. Instead, you tap the inner paddle for upshifts to a smaller sprocket, or push it to move the chain to a lower gear. It's not quite as intuitive as Shimano SIS, but it works well with crisp and accurate shifting, and you do get used to it pretty quickly.

My main issue is that I feel it's slightly overgeared at the bottom end. Even in 2024 you can find triple chainsets on touring bikes, such as the Surly Disc Trucker I tested in 2021. This year's model comes with a triple, as do the Tour and Expedition from Ridgeback.

The reason for a triple chainset on a tourer is to give you a super-wide range of gears so you can always ride at the right cadence – that and having a very low bottom gear. If you're carrying two or more panniers and you reach the foot of a climb stretching as far as the eye can see, there's pretty much no bottom gear that would be too small for me.

It's not unusual for a bottom gear to be a teeny-tiny wall-crawling 20in or so – such as the Disc Trucker's 26x34 pairing. The Sonder gets nowhere near that, thanks to the 1:1 ratio bottom gear offered by the 48/32 chainset and 11-32 cassette.

For most of us – even me! – most of the time that will be low enough, but for an extended, loaded tour somewhere that isn't as flat as Kansas (a state officially flatter than a pancake!) you'll want to go lower still.

The easiest way to get down to 20in or so would be to go for a smaller chainset, such as the 11-speed-compatible Spa Cycles TD-2 Super Compact that goes as low as 42/26 and even 40/24. You can also read our feature on how to get ultra low gearing...

Sonder Santiago Grand Tourer: Braking

One of my former colleagues argued years ago that mechanical disc brakes are the worst of all worlds – nowhere near as good as hydraulic discs and with so few advantages over rim brakes that they're not worth the effort.

But if there is one place that cable-actuated discs are actually a very sound choice, I think it's the touring bike.

Why? Well, I've cycled through Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and some parts of Australia that aren't that close to a bike shop. And if I had to fix or fettle some brakes in the back of beyond, I'd be more confident that my technical skills and sausage fingers could cope better with mechanical matters than hydraulics.

And there's another very practical reason to choose disc brakes over rim brakes if you're out in the wilds. Years ago, while we were touring in Australia, one of the tyres on my wife's bike developed a huge (and I mean HUGE) split that even a boot wouldn't have coped with, with the nearest bike shop half a day's ride away. And I had to improvise with gaffer tape around the tyre AND rim. As a temporary measure it worked – but it did mean she was down to one brake.

With rim brakes that wouldn't have mattered so much. But if you bash your rim out of true – easily doable on Australia's corrugated tracks – you can still carry on riding with disc brakes. The ability to ride with a dinked or buckled rim is one of the great advantages of disc brakes that is all-too-often overlooked.

The brakes themselves are decent. They're not as powerful as hydraulics and they require more effort on your part, but they're controlled and consistent in all weather, which I was well able to try out during testing during the early part of the year.

Are you sitting comfortably?

I'm not a fan of Brooks' leather saddles. There, I've said it. I know that generations of British cycle-tourists swear by them, I just swear at them. I have tried them. Honest.

I attempted to ride one in for 1,750 miles and it was as unyielding after that distance as it was at the start. That said, I do like the non-leather Brooks Cambium – which is also better for the cows of the world.

If I were to buy the Sonder Santiago specced with SRAM Rival I'd go for the Touring version with an own-brand saddle, which is £200 cheaper – and the Brooks saddle accounts for a lot of that difference.

The seatpost and stem are both Sonder and standard alloy fare – nothing wrong with that – and the package is finished off with a Sonder Mool rear rack, with an 18kg capacity. That would be enough for me, but you might want more.

The wheels are handmade at Sonder's own facility in Nottingham – they performed well and look like they'd go on rolling well for years – and I've already talked about the Goodyear County tyres.

Sonder Santiago Grand Tourer: Value

I think the Santiago Grand Tourer represents pretty good value for the quality of bike that Sonder has delivered.

The Surly Disc Trucker has a chromoly frame and arguably lower spec components and costs £2,400, though it has a great ride and a suitably low bottom gear.

Spa Cycles has a large range of tourers that probably edge the Sonder for value, with its Reynolds 725 Steel Tourer with 3x Sora starting at £1,250, for instance, though that has rim brakes. But even its 725 Disc Tourer is a fair bit cheaper than the Sonder, costing £1,525, and that has the option of a wall-crawling 24x34 bottom gear.

Dave liked the Thorn Club Tour MkV when he reviewed it in 2020, when it cost £1,870.86, though it now starts at £2,100. But it's available in 10 sizes, compared with just four for the Sonder, and in all sorts of configurations and with flat or drop bars.

Sonder Santiago Grand Tourer: Conclusion

I really enjoyed riding the Sonder Santiago – and would happily have held on to it for long-distance commuting (not that I commute any more...), touring and pretty much any type of riding, and over all sorts of surfaces. It's comfortable, well equipped, comes with mudguards and a rear rack and a full range of fixtures and fittings. I'm not a fan of the Brooks leather saddle, and I'd have liked a lower bottom gear, but it's still a classy tourer and one I'd very happily recommend.

> Buy now: Sonder Santiago Grand Tourer for £1,849 from Alpkit

Verdict

High-quality, comfortable tourer with a lively ride and well-chosen components, though I'd have liked a lower bottom gear