Hiking the Guadarramas

Today I decided to go hiking in the Sierra de Guadarrama to the north of the city. My goal was the Calzada Romana, the restored remains of Roman road that once connected Toledo and Segovia. The road is reached through the town of Cercedilla, about 35 miles to the north of Madrid.

The trip started rather inauspiciously. I arrived at Chamartin station to discover that the schedule for the Cercanias (nearby routes) train to Cercedilla had been changed, and apparently the Internet was the last to know. In the end, I ended up leaving Madrid at 3pm, over an hour later than I had intended.

The train trip took slightly more than an hour. The Cercanias line ends at Cercedilla, where I picked up another, smaller train, to take me to a ski resort at the top of the Guadarrama ridge. The ski resort is called Navacerrada, obviously a derivative of "closed due to snow".

The small electric train which climbed the mountains above Cercedilla was pretty interesting. It bumped along for about 25 minutes, past ever more incredible views, to drop me at Navacerrada.

Navacerrada was rather active for an off-season ski resort, mostly because it sits astride an important road between Madrid and Segovia. It looks like a fantastic place to ski, but it took me a while to find the trailhead. It was 5:30 by the time I was on the trail, named the Camino Schmid after the German hiker who first popularized this part of the Guadarrama range.

So starting from about 5700 feet in elevation, I hiked down the Camino Schmid. After about 4 or 5 kilometers, I made it to the Puerta de Frenfria, the pass through which the old Roman road runs. From Fuenfria, I turned on to the Calzada Romana itself, and descends to the national park below over the course of 4 more kilometers.

The Calzada Romana was pretty neat. Apparantly the road was restored by King Philip V in the early 1700s to make the route to his summer palaca at Rio Frio quicker, but the old Roman road is quite apparent. It turns out, actually, that hiking on the ruins of a 2000 year old road is sort of like hiking in a dry stream bed, in that it was rocky, uneven, and a little bit slow-going. Nonetheless, the road looked great, and made the whole hike very much a worthwhile experience.

I reached the national park of Fuenfria a little over two hours after leaving Navacerrada. After carefully navigating through a random crowd of bulls (grazing inside the park), I came to the end of the Calzada Romana. It was only then that I discovered that I still had to walk more than 4 kilometers back to the train station. Luckily this was all on a sidewalk, so I made considerably better time, and reached Cercedilla in time to catch the 8:45 train. All told, I hiked between 7 and 8 miles in about 3.5 hours.