Madrid’s Sierra Norte offers a variety of tourist resources that are hard to come by anywhere else. Mountain villages, charming nooks, trails, pastures and meadows, peaks, rivers, large bodies of water, forests that line the riverbanks, pine and oak groves and even one of the most revered oak groves in Spain, the Hayedo de Montejo. In these lands, one may still experience a pastoral life consigned to oblivion today, a life when the hour of the day was marked by natural cycles.
A great option for a two-day getaway in this wide expanse of land to the north of the Region of Madrid, consists of its towns situated in the river basin of Jarama, into which the River Lozoya drains. The confluence of these two rivers, one descending from the Sierra del Rincón and the other from Macizo de Peñalara, is precisely where we begin our exploration.

Following the footprints of our history

This vast territory has been the stage for great civilisations. The fertile soil provided by the rivers was highly appreciated by ancient civilisations, from Rome to the present day. The Visigoths left their footprints in Castro de la Oliva, and in Patones, the Arabs built a series of watchtowers in Talamanca del Jarama, and the Renaissance was also reflected in Torrelaguna through the figure of its most illustrious son: the cardinal Cisneros.

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The cultural landscape of water

We start from the car park at Pontón de la Oliva, on a long yet comfortable and varied excursion. We’ll find traces of the first large-scale waterworks that were built to supply Madrid, as well as a natural environment of surpassing quality, and other remains of Spanish history.
The Tourist Information Office provides the neccesary information about the sanitary recommendations to be complied by citizens, as well as all measures of perimetral closure enacted in the region of Madrid. Do not forget to ask for the limits between Madrid and Castilla-La Mancha.

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