Heading For The Hills

I've spent many an hour sitting up on my building's roof terrace, staring out at the mountains of the Sierra de Guadarrama in the hazy distance, but somehow I'd never got round to going there until last weekend. I don't know why, they're only an hour and a half and €4.20 away on the cercanias (commuter train) and I do love mountains. Anyway, better late than never. After reading up on where to go here, me and Kate headed out to Cercedilla (that's "Ther-theh-deeyya" for those of you unfamiliar with Castillian pronunciation) on Saturday. The perenially unreliable weather forecast had been for rain but apart from the odd drizzly shower, it was fine.

The first impression you get when arriving in the mountains from Madrid is just how green everything is. The Madrid plateau is pretty dry and dusty, vegetation is sparse and the trees are small and low. Not so here. It took me a while (and a few weird insect sightings) to believe I wasn't back in the Peak District, perhaps near the Derwent dams. You often see the Sierra shrouded in clouds while the rest of the sky is clear blue, and the effect of this is clear to see - tall trees, ferns and moss. Moss! Sometimes you don't notice something's been missing 'til you see it again. It felt like we'd travelled a lot further than we had. It felt like another country.

Having arrived fairly clueless, we found a helpful guide to the hiking routes around the Cercedilla valley in the train station with everything from short easy ones to longer, harder and higher ones. We arrived fairly late in the day so we only had time to go a little way, but still ended up getting to a beautiful rocky outcrop with a great view across the valley after walking through fairly dense evergreen woodland. Our progress was, mind you, delayed by our first encounter with some Spanish cows that were grazing across the path with a calf in tow. Now, these aren't quite fresians, and after seeing a bullfight a month or so ago, I was pretty wary of the potential damage their horns could do! In the end they turned out to be fairly passive though.

Thick walls

We were staying in a lovely little 'Casa Rural' right opposite the station. These are essentially big country cottages split into hotel rooms, and not too pricey at €60 for a (really nice) double en suite room with breakfast. The enormous exterior walls must have been more than two feet thick, testament to how cold it must get up there in winter. Not expecting much, we set off in search of some vegan dinner for Kate. Lo and behold, before we even got to the main town centre, we stumbled across another, quirkier, Casa Rural offering a vegetarian menu who obliged us with some tasty wok fried veg. You get the feeling that Cercedilla is a bit of a haven for slightly alternative folk, a bit like I imagine Aspen, Colorado to be after reading Hunter S Thompson's autobiography. From what we saw it definately had a bit of an older ski-hippy feel to it. Over dinner, we discussed how it isn't exactly that Spain doesn't do vegetarian - it's often not too difficult to find a vegetarian restaurant - more that the standard non-veggie places will just not have any veggie options.

The next day, we headed higher up to Cotos on the amazing little mountain train that precariously winds it's way up the hillsides. The snowplow-equipped engine parked in the station demonstrated why the ticket price (€11.40 return) for this short journey was more than it cost to get from Madrid to Cercedilla. It obviously costs a lot to keep it open. Once it got going though, it was worth every centimo. Great views snatched between gaps in the trees and the amazing sight of the winding track ahead (while sticking your head out the window) were incredible, even if it feels a little hair-raising when it goes round a sharp outside bend! The word that kept springing to mind was Alpine. It almost looks like Switzerland in places, but the glimpses of the plain stretching out past the slopes reminds you where you are. There isn't much to Cotos, which means 'hunting grounds' apparently, only a couple of chalet type buildings with walker's restaurants. From there, there's a route, again on display in the station, to the summit of the highest peak in the sierra. We weren't quite equipped for, or up to, that, but there are pretty spectacular views on the route up to the foot of it too. This maybe isn't recommended for hay-fever sufferers though. You could actually see swirls of pollen blowing off some of the trees, and I swear you actually could see great clouds of it rising out of the woods across the valley.

After a bit more bovine bother on the way back from an angry sounding cow following us up a trail, and a quick beer and bocadillo outside one of the chalets, we caught the train back down the mountain, breathing in the lovely fresh mountain air, and then transferred onto the cercanias back to Madrid. There seemed to be some kind of singing club going on on the train, with a group of older men and women heartily (albeit not always tunefully) belting out evocative traditional Spanish songs with a guitar and encouraging the rest of the carriage to join in. They had a right old laugh when I asked them for a photo - "Take a picture of my wife, not him! He's an ugly bastard!" (or something along those lines).

Deluge

Back to Madrid where it promptly hammered it down with rain. It doesn't really do drizzle here, it either spits briefly or releases an absolute deluge complete with thunder and lightning. I got caught in one of these between classes the other week and ended up very wet on the metro. Spare a thought for those still camping out in Sol through this. They're still there, with a creative buzz still running through the square, although it does seem to be more of a hard core left now that the movement has spread out to individual neighbourhoods. They actually agreed a list of demands last week which makes for interesting reading.

I can't believe I've only got 3 weeks left, and only 2 weeks of teaching left. Looking forward to seeing home but also sad to be leaving Madrid. I think I'll come back and visit from (probably) Barcelona after September. I'll be writing some things summing up my time here and giving advice with the benefit of hindsight for potential Madrileños before I go, as well as a Best of Madrid post.