Oh Meu Deus 2027

Oh meu deus, literally "my God" in Portuguese, is exactly what you catch yourself murmuring when you turn around on a ridge of the Serra da Estrela and the landscape knocks you flat in one hit ⛰️. The race name is no accident: it sums up the event’s promise all by itself—this suspended moment when the Portuguese mountain quite literally takes your breath away, and not only because it climbs hard 😉. Oh Meu Deus by UTMB is a trail held every year in early May in central Portugal, hosted by the town of Seia, just a stone’s throw from the country’s largest natural park. Linked since 2025 to the UTMB World Series, it has established itself as one of the circuit’s most distinctive European stops, carried by a region still little trodden by the crowds of international trail running.

The adventure began in 2011, when local organizers had the idea of turning the pastoral paths of the Serra da Estrela into a playground for runners 🙂. Over the editions, the distances lengthen, the perimeter expands, and the race ends up covering most of the natural park in its long version. The major turning point comes in 2025, when the event joins the UTMB World Series family and changes scale: from a well-oiled regional competition, it becomes a meeting point with international ambitions, while jealously preserving the local DNA that makes it strong 🧬. The route now takes in the Serra do Açor, the Serra de Lousã, the Schist villages and several Historic villages. So many territories that turn each edition into a true cultural crossing as much as a physical one.

The course of the flagship race, the "100M", exceeds 167 km with 8,900 mD+, which places it without hesitation in the "top-tier leg-breaker" category 😅. The event starts and finishes in Seia, a town nestled against the mountainside since the 12th century. In between, the route strings together switchback paths inherited from transhumance (the very trails shepherds used to take their flocks from the valley to the plateau), crosses dense forests where the silence thickens, follows deep-cut rivers, and climbs onto ridgelines open to all four winds 💨. The schist villages passed through during the race (Talasnal, Casal Novo, Pena, Fajão, Candal, among others) are hamlets of dark stone built right into the rock, perched in the mountains with a vernacular architectural logic that would make many urban-planning competitions blush 🏘️. The course is anything but runnable: it demands technical skill, patience on the rutted singletrack, and a real ability to manage the effort over time.

Besides the "100M", Oh Meu Deus by UTMB offers three other formats: a "100K" of 94 km and 5,300 mD+, a "50K" of 52 km and 2,900 mD+, and a "20K" of 22 km and 1,000 mD+. 📊 The qualification system follows the UTMB World Series model, with Running Stones to accumulate depending on the chosen format (from 1 stone for the "20K" to 4 for the "100M"). The race thus fits into the circuit’s global ecosystem, which helps it attract runners from many countries in Europe, but also North America and Asia, in search of running stones in a setting that is frankly off the beaten track of Alpine ultra-trail 💎.

The event also carries a particular emotional dimension that sets it apart in the ultra-trail landscape 🤩. The central Portugal region has been hit hard by forest fires in recent years, and the organization has chosen to make this an integral part of the race narrative: each runner who crosses these slopes is presented as an actor in the territory’s symbolic reconstruction, a light in a landscape that is healing ❤️‍🩹. The tone is sincere; it matches the way the residents of Seia, Arganil, Lousã, Pampilhosa da Serra or Góis welcome participants: with genuine warmth, from people for whom the event isn’t a pretext for collector T-shirts but a true shared pride. Charity bibs are also offered, allowing runners to race in support of local associations linked to the rebuilding of the region.

Once your legs are back on the ground and the salt has dried on your arms, Seia and its immediate surroundings are worth lingering around 🍞. The town is home to a Bread Museum, the only one of its kind in Portugal, which, for someone who has just crushed 167 km on the ridges, takes on a slightly existential resonance. The Serra da Estrela cheeses, soft-ripened with a bold flavor, are a national institution as well as an unbeatable gastronomic argument 🧀. The legend of Viriato, the Lusitanian shepherd turned warrior who stood up to the Romans from these very mountains, hangs over the whole territory. And somewhere, an ultra-trail runner who survives 8,900 mD+ in May unknowingly pays him a pretty well-deserved tribute 😋.