 Las Dehesas
There's a park just north of the Cercedilla train station,
which is a worthy destination in and of itself. (It's a one-hour
walk perhaps. Don't take the road. There's an old road with
lots of shade just to the west of the train station which
you can follow all the way here, and vice versa.) If you continue
the Camino Schmid to Puerto Fuenfria and take the old Roman
road back south, you'll eventually come to this park area.
A pretty little hotel in the park, which we were initially interested
in staying in, but were turned off by the rudeness of the personnel.
Puerto de Fuenfria is up that way.
This is a view of Siete Picos (Can you count the seven peaks?)
from one of the roads back to Madrid. Puerto de Navacerrada
would be about an inch or two to the right of those peaks. The
photos at the beginning of this series were taken on the other
side of those mountains.
This is a view of Cercedilla from the same road-side view point
as in the photo above.
This is a photo of part of what's known as the old
"Roman Road" (Calzada Romana), which according to Wikipedia in this entry: La Granja, apparently isn't a Roman road at all.
However, there's no mention of that in this entry: Dehesas de Cercedilla.
(CC Photo from Wikimedia)
A little info on the Sierra area.
In general, the Sierra is a pretty popular area in Madrid.
The whole area is criss-crossed with trails for you to explore
at your leisure. There are plenty of books in Spanish on the
subject and I even recall seeing one in English once. It's
a safe bet that there's a trail joining any two points within
a few hours of each other that have a bus line or train station
nearby.
Traffic can sometimes be a problem both in winter and in summer
on the weekends especially. I know of people who find apartments
to rent every August for 1,000 euros for the month, but buying
real estate is usually excessively expensive.
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