Aranjuez

It was only yesterday that I realised I'd never posted our day out in Aranjuez in June. Too busy doing to write. Of course, Habibi is more organised! So here we go.

We walked down from the Moorish style railway station - shades of Toledo - along tree-lined roads, stopping at a corner cafe bar for a break, and then rounded said corner to find we were almost there. The palace of Aranjuez used to be a royal summer residence, an escape from the heat of Madrid. The town is 47km south of Madrid, and 200m lower. It's got a proper river, the Rio Tajo (the River Tagus, en route from Toledo to the sea) - and another one too, as I recall - and it's own micro-climate, which enables local farmers to grow strawberries and asparagus. Which makes it downright lush compared with sun-baked Madrid. In the past, I get the impression that Aranjuez was to Madrid what Kent was to London. - its kitchen garden.

Anyway, what was a royal refuge is now a peaceful, elegant day out for us plebs, about 40 minutes by train (if that) from Madrid Atocha. In the summer months, you can ride on the Tren de Fresas, the 19thC steam train that used to transport strawberries to Madrid, along the line that was built for the purpose. The train staff wear 19thC dress, and serve strawberries to all the passengers. Or, if it's sold out, there's a regular service every 10 minutes or so, all day every day. It was. Ah well.

On the Sunday we went, the town was quiet and closed, apart from the cafe bars and restaurants. The area closest to the palace is quite old, as we discovered when we went looking for lunch, though it has it's share of tall apartment buildings.

Clearly, modern Aranjuez has expanded, but in the opposite direction from the palace and the railway station, which I think is surrounded by farmland - hard to be sure on the basis of a day out! We liked what we saw, and had a very good lunch at a very friendly restaurant - it was on a corner, had a yellow interior and a very nice owner, and I just wish I could remember its name!

We left it rather late for a proper tour of the palace itself, and I for one was more interested in the gardens than the furniture, so we saved the palace, and the porcelain house, the barge house and several other curiosities of royal leisure for another occasion.

NOTE TO SELF FOR NEXT MAY & JUNE. We just missed the Música Antigua Aranjuez, the annual Early Music Festival, this year. The concerts are held at the palace itself. Don't miss next year's festival! P.S. Especially if Jordi Savall & family are on. End of note to self.

Crossing the big cobbled square, and taking time to admire some handsome stone and brick buildings, we passed through a gateway into the first of the gardens.




(Yup, there's a bee in this picture. If you want to know more about the humble bumble, look it up!)



There were statues, bronzes, ponds and fountains everywhere, as part of formal open vistas; or set half-hidden at the end of shady avenues; or tucked away in woodland glades and clearings.

I just love the grin on her face! 'Hey! Just look at me stark naked in the middle of a royal garden!'

...and that sky.....




Now this fellow is Bacchus. Most Bacchus paintings and statues are more Michael Hutchence than - erm - middle aged fat bloke of your choice - but there's a definite ring of truth here. And something familiar......
Here's an impressive water feature. I imagine they wanted to protect the palace from the river.


(Madrid's Rio Manzanares was a proper river in Roman times, and maybe still qualified in the 16thC, when Madrid replaced Toledo as the capital but it hardly counts these days. You can see the attraction of all this rippling cool in the summer's heat.)

In the quiet water downstream there are hundreds and hundreds of fish trying to swim up river. Some just hover in place, holding their position against the current, but others get as far as the first rise, and then there's nowhere to go.

More water. The royal barges used to be moored at the jetty below. One king, who didn't have a war to go to, used to have mini naval battles staged on the lake, with live mini canons. Others just floated around in fancy dress - very special fancy dress.


This is a relic (evidently still in use) of a water mangement system that goes back to the Moors and beyond. Water is directed through acequias (irrigation channels) which can be opened up and shut off at various points, to allow proper irrigation of all parts of a piece of land. Andalucian farmers used to agree responsibility for maintaining their sections of the acequia network, and a schedule for opening and closing the water flow to the different farms on the network.
And another reference to old ways: this apartment building is not so different from the old courtyards that developed into the corrales de comedias of the 16thC and 17thC.

When Londoners were going to the Rose, the Globe and the Curtain to hear the latest from Kyd and Marlowe and Shakespeare, Spaniards were at the corrales de comedia for the latest from Tirso de Molina and Calderón de la Barca. There's still a corral at Almagro in Ciudád Reál, and they have an annual theatre festival.


The Rio Tajo continues beyond the palace walls, with alder, willow and honeysuckle growing wild along its banks.
And you might find the odd toadstool, or skeleton leaf, or eggshell.



Maybe the odd beetle?

If you're into that kind of thing?

Parque de Peñalara

The city of Madrid sits in the middle of Madrid province, and the north of the province climbs into the Guadarrama mountains. Habibi's in the UK right now, so I went off for a small solo adventure yesterday, returning to Cercedilla to see what we missed in February.

From Cercedilla to Cotos takes about 40 minutes by train, and I'd been told that the walk back down takes about six hours, so I caught the first train out of Madrid, apiedrand was in Puerto de Cotos, booted & backpacked, by 11.30.

Only you can't walk down from there: the walk starts at Navacerrada. In February we got off the little Cotos train too early. This time I'd stayed on too long. Which is how I came to spend the day walking more up than down, under the bluest sky, following paths through a landscape carved out aeons ago by glaciers, and now protected - and offered to José Public - as the Parque Natural de Peñalara. I saw lots of butterflies and lizards, and heard crickets fizzing & buzzing in all directions, although it was mid-afternoon before I actually saw one. And two big birds of prey. I don't know what anything was, but I was out for hours and loved it. And I took some pictures.

The blur in the picture above is a hummingbird moth, one of two I saw in the lavender planted outside the Casa de Cotos information centre.

Mirado del Gitano, Gypsy's View, with the arrow pointing at Cabeza de Hermano Mayor (Hermano Menor to the right) ............Big Brother & Little Brother.

Laguna de los Pájaros in the distance from Ruta 2. It was actually a full-on, no-kidding, to-die-for cerulean blue, but everything I photograph comes out washed out, and has to be warmed up in Picasa before it even comes close to the original. So frustrating. Anyway, next Saturday, I shall be back in the mountains for another glacier-theme day out, walking along Ruta 4 to the Lake of the Birds, 2,175m. above sea level. The starting point, Casa de Cotos, is at something like 1,910, so it's not as much of a climb as it sounds!

You have to try and imagine this lichen in 70s Retro lime green.

Peaty brown water and green, green mosses.

This isn't fog. It's cloud. The dot on the path is a walker, and the nipple on the mound on the right is the Refugio de Zabalo. From this southerly direction, to a townie on a day out, the refuge merely gives scale to the mountain behind, but if you were up here in rough weather, you would be deeply grateful to the people who built it.

This was a warm day, some 26-30C but by early afternoon, the breeze had an edge to it. (The railway station cafe at Cercedilla had a snowy photograph of the Cotos train on the wall, and a collection of sleds and snowshoes.) It says something about the weather here that a building this size has buttresses...

This cairn is on the south side of the refuge (on the right of the picture), and an encouraging touch.
I don't think these scrapes are man-made.

Looking down from the refuge. This is a wetland area, with streams, peatbogs and frogs.

Laguna de Peñalara, 2,020m up. I thought that the blue, blue Laguna de los Pájaros was the Laguna de Peñalara - it's infinitely more impressive! This rather sad green pool has always been very popular with weekend escapees from Madrid, and has taken a battering over the years. Now it's being restored for wildlife. There's a ski slope a little way south east of the park, and in fact part of the park itself used to be a ski resort. It has been a conservation area since the late nineties, and they're working to restore the ecological balance of the area, without closing it to visitors.
On the other side, the cairns were the only markers for the descent.

Going down.
Looking back.

When I heard bells (and the sound carries a long way up there) I assumed that there were goats roaming. Madrid is so dry, it didn't occur to me that there could be wetlands so close, and I was surprised at the number of cows I saw from the train on the way to Cercedilla. I rather assumed that dairy farming was more or less exclusive to Galicia and Asturias, backing onto the Atlantic in the north.
The trees are healthy, but mostly naked on one side. Hmm, winter must be interesting up here.

The retama - a kind of broom or gorse - on the higher slopes still has a lot of sunny yellow flowers left, but lower down it has handsome fat pods covered in a purple-grey velvet - and usually a few surprise pinecones, dropped from the canopy of branches overhead.

It seems to me that most European wildflowers are yellow, blue or purple, which suggests that the so-called English cottage garden owes a great deal to the plant-hunters of previous centuries.