Hello and welcome to live coverage of Stage 13 of La Vuelta - the first of three successive mountain-top finishes in the Asturias-Leon mountains that will give us a good indication of who's going to win the 73rd edition of the race.

Belgian Dylan Teuns is in the break for the fourth day running - will it be fourth-time lucky for BMC? He has team-mate Joey Rosskopf to keep him company as the team tries to salvage something from a race in which their leader, Richie Porte, has been very sub-par. Ditto Rohan Dennis since his opening day TT win.

It's worth pointing out that Lotto Soudal have FIVE riders in this break: Monfort, De Gendt, Lambrecht, Armee and Van der Sande. Of those five you'd expect only De Gendt and, perhaps, Van der Sande to have a chance of winning - although given the company, I wouldn't bet on any of them to triumph even with their power in numbers.

Cofidis are setting the pace on the front of the pack with the help from one rider apiece from Movistar and LottoNL-Jumbo. The gap seems to have stabilised around the nine-minute mark.

The road has been heading uphill on a false flat for quite some time now - and our 32 leaders have had to negotiate two short but very sharp ramps en route to the official start of the Puerto de Tarna, which comes in around 10km. The gap is up to 9'25" now which puts both Ben King and Rafal Maja above Jesus Herrada in the virtual red jersey standings. Things are simmering nicely.

A reminder that the three major jerseys are all being worn by Spaniards: Mate in the polka dots, Alejandro Valverde in the green points jersey, and Herrada in red. Two of those riders (Mate and Herrada) are at Cofidis, while the latter is a former team-mate of Valverde's at Movistar, where he rode with his brother Jose (now at Cofidis, too) for many years. It's very incestuous, pro cycling.

That's your recap, folks. After that early climb things settled a bit even if the pace was still very fast. The break stretched its lead towards eight minutes and that puts Ben King into the virtual race lead. The American from Dimension Data - already a double stage winner - was 7'04" down on Herrada on GC this morning in 20th place.

Just as he did yesterday, Thomas De Gendt picked up 3pts going over the top of the Cat.3 Alto de la Madera after 21km ahead of Bauke Mollema and Ben King. That put the Belgian up to 19pts in the battle for the blue polka dot jersey, which is being led by Luis Angel Mate on 60pts with another 20pts up for grabs today. King is Mate's closest rival here, now on 34pts, with Mollema in third, now on 32pts.

Before we follow their every pedal stoke, let's bring you up to speed with how this 32-man break came to be where it is now... First things first, and the red jersey of Jesus Herrada made an audacious early bid to be part of the day's break - but his presence was not accepted and the Spaniard was soon back in the pack.

There are some big names in this break including double stage winner Ben King, double runner-up Bauke Mollema, climbers Rafal Majka, Sergio Henao, Ilnur Zakarin, breakaway specialists Thoams De Gendt, Dylan Teuns, Gorka Izagirre, and the polka dot jersey Luis Angel Mate.

We join the race LIVE now after the first 65-odd kilometres and we have a HUGE group of 32 riders out ahead of the pack with a tasty seven-minute lead.

It was sunny but cool as the 170 remaining riders left Candas at the start of today's all-important stage.

Here's the official profile of today's stage - with those two Cat.1 climbs coming in the second half.

Part of that initial break, Jesus Herrada (Cofidis) came home two-and-a-half-minutes down in 16th place after the leaders fragmented over a challenging final 30km of racing. But with the peloton crossing the line almost 12 minutes in arrears, the Spaniard took over the race lead by a considerable margin. Herrada now leads Great Britain’s Simon Yates (Mitchelton-Scott) by 3’22” with Spanish veteran Alejandro Valverde (Movistar) one second back in third place and Nairo Quintana another 14 seconds back.

Frenchman Alexandre Geniez played his cards right to win Stage 12 of La Vuelta from an elite breakaway as Spaniard Jesus Herrada took over the race lead after an eventful day of racing in cloudy Galicia. On a fast and technical downhill finish to the 181km stage along the coastline of northern Spain, the experienced Geniez (Ag2R-La Mondiale) opened up his sprint early and held off frustrated Dutchman Dylan van Baarle (Team Sky) on the narrow home straight to pick up the third Vuelta stage win of his career.