A note on the Camino from Madrid
by Turlough O’Donnell
Introduction
It is amazing that the Camino from the capital of Spain is one of the least well-known. It is difficult to find people who have done it. It is difficult to find information about it. It was not even marked on one map of the Caminos that I saw. And it is not easy to understand this.
And yet it is wonderful – at least the second and third stages – for I stopped at Cercedilla at the end of the third stage.
This is definitely not a guide. I got lost, as you will see, and no-one needs a guide to getting lost, you can do it very well for yourself!
As always, people must make their own decisions; this is information and not advice.
This is an attempt to start a conversation between pilgrims about the road which leaves the wonderful city of Madrid and joins the Francés at Sahagun.
Leaving Madrid for Tres Cantos
In Madrid, I visited some favourite tapas bars and finished up sitting quietly in the Plaza de Espana. There are statues there of Don Quijote and Sancho riding out across the plains of La Mancha. They look strong, purposeful, we-mean-business, these righters of wrongs but they know nothing of the adventures and misfortunes yet to come. Determined but unknowing, they are setting out into space or into emptiness.
The Plaza used to demonstrate this space and emptiness. It was sparse and open and that gave the impression of vastness, brightness and broad horizons - the plains of La Mancha . Now, however, the Plaza has changed. It has been planted with plants but planted also with a different vision. There are miraculously semi-mature trees there, it is now very green and no longer brown and dusty and before Knight and Squire get anywhere they will have to get through a barrier of enchantment because a generous planting of St John’s Wort and other stuff is in their way.
I was annoyed about the changes but then in the heart of this great city a bird sang out of the greenery; this softened my cough.
The next day I was up and out by 9am onto the Gran Vía and very late by Camino standards. I hit the road and after breakfast of a slice of pizza and a Coke I was on my way and all anxieties about the obscure Madrid Camino had vanished; the road would carry me and I was confident of that.
The Madrid Camino is indeed obscure. It is hard to get information about it. Here’s how bad it is: there is no Brierley!
There is some U-Tube commentary but I couldn’t find much more. Later, in Santiago, I met someone who had done it. He used the Camino de Madrid by Jeffery Barrera published by Barrera Books and available on Amazon; I look forward to reading it.
So I relied on Gronze and Apple Maps.
Gronze is very helpful; it provides a basic sketch- map of the route and a rather terse commentary on it; so, helpful, but not the full story.
The Gronze sketch - map shows two routes out of Madrid converging at Plaza Castilla. I decided not to go to the official starting point at the Plaza de Santiago but to punch in “Plaza Castilla” and follow the app from where I was in the Gran Vía.
App-following is fine in that it brings you to your destination and therefore does what it says on the tin but walking the Camino is surely more poetic than that. I became entranced with the phone, looking down when I should have been looking around, validated by it when I took the correct turn and scolded by it when I took the wrong one. I was caught by the phone when I wanted to be caught by the city; it wasn’t my guide, it was my boss and there should be no bosses on the Camino.
It also stops you getting hopelessly lost and thus deprives you of one of the great experiences of the Camino.
These apps and these mobile phones; they make the liberating, mystical, poetic, journey into a dull prosaic head-down and sullen trek; to hell with them!
The route took me along the long-long Calle De Bravo Murillo with its cheap clothes shops and vegetable shops being set up for the day and everywhere there were Cafés where on the way to work, the day can start gracefully.
The Spanish do the pause better than anyone. There is the pause for coffee on the way to work; there is the mid-morning break for coffee; there is the siesta ; there are the tapas on the way home from work; there might be a stroll in the evening and, if the night is late, a pause in the early hours for churros and chocolate where revellers meet the early risers. There are pauses of course for meals including the wonderful magnificent contribution to civilization - second-breakfast (the almuerzo).
Life is lived in the pauses.
It was a beautiful day with a breeze and I arrived at Plaza Castilla for a pause for coffee, tortilla and zumo de Naranja. I then walked on the Paseo de la Castellana having punched in “Fuencarral” because I thought, from the sketch-map, that if I reached there I was almost out of the city completely and imagined a quiet country stroll thereafter. It's near here that I first see the huge skyscrapers that dominate the city and dominate the skyline for some distance along the Camino. They have beauty and fine lines but they say to me “we are the power in this land, taller than the Parliament, taller than the Palace, taller than the Courts and Cathedrals”.
At Fuencarral I paused for something to eat at a little café. It was like the very old days on the Camino Francés. Pilgrims were a rarity, I could see. It was in no way transactional; it was an ancient dialogue between pilgrim and the little community gathered there. I was asked by a customer where I was going. She had done the Camino. The owner talked about Belfast and the gable paintings; he had never seen them in reality but one day perhaps. On the way out I was given a special biscuit they make for the Fiesta de San Isidoro.
On the road so far I saw not one yellow arrow, nor one pilgrim, and it was to remain like this the whole day.
On leaving Fuencarral I punched in “Tres Cantos” – electing the walking option.
This led me to one of the ugliest paths I have ever walked on. At some stage I am on a cycle path which is about 4 metres wide. There are low pre-cast concrete walls, crash barriers really, on both sides. To my right is the railway line and to the left a motorway. And overhead there are two bridges carrying more traffic. Miraculously a small bush grows at the side of the path. If it can survive on elimination road, then so can I!
The heat is building up. I know that I am on the path or a path to Tres Cantos because the App tells me so, but still there is no yellow arrow and the road is bleak. I stop at a bus stop for shelter and along comes the bus for Tres Cantos. I don’t take it. Immediately after it goes, I regret that pious decision. I will take the next one. I was trying to get to a particular hostel on the outskirts of Tres Cantos. Again I start to walk and the App takes me through an industrial estate and tells me that I am very close to the hostel. But I am stopped by Security guards. They won’t let me walk through. So near and yet so far. I give up after a while and head to a hotel further away.
I had walked the wrong path – all morning and all afternoon and into the evening.
But what is the right path?
Tres Cantos to Manzanares el Real
My companions on the Road had joined me in Tres Cantos. We stayed in a motel-type place – with a vending machine and no dinner available. To add to the surreal atmosphere a little robot makes endless passes up and down the clean floor, cleaning the already clean floor and constantly and irritatingly missing the one little speck on the floor.
This is a pastoral walk once you get out of town. Gronze was very useful. And today a miracle; the way is very well signed with yellow arrows. You go down in the vicinity of the Plaza of the Station and you exit the town. As we walked through the countryside, we heard the sound of an invisible melodious warbler, named for us by the bird App. We saw some horses and foals. Further into the countryside we heard the sound of a scythe being sharpened and saw it being applied to the long grass in short strokes. This is ancient farming activity, while behind us those huge Cathedrals of Capitalism in Madrid were still to be seen. They won’t go away -who are those guys?
We stopped in the town square of Colmenar Viejo for lunch. The day was heating up. After lunch we walked to the outskirts of town to the point where we would again go cross country with little shade for a 14.8 Km hike through what looked like beautiful country. One of us was suffering from the heat and worried about a long journey without shade or stops.
We took the decision to get a taxi to our hostel at Manzanares el Real.
We were not carrying our bags. And I’ll pause here to explain something which might help others.
I had asked AI if the bag transport system worked on the Madrid Camino and was told yes.
I emailed (better than phoning) Paq Mochilla and another company from Tres Cantos and to be fair they got back very promptly to say the service was not available on the Madrid Camino. This meant that I had to phone the taxi company in Tres Cantos and explain the system: that they would collect the bags at our hotel, drop them to the next hotel, arrange that the next hotel was there to collect them and arrange how payment would be made. It worked, cumbersomely, over the next few days. The taxi companies were great but it was clear that they didn’t use this system – it was a first for them.
The solution is either to carry your own bag on this Camino ( which I had done on the first day) or to make those arrangements with taxi companies well in advance from home and that will involve getting over the barrier of explaining why you want to book a taxi and then not travel in it but simply put your bags in it, but pay the price of travelling in it while you walk, and having co-ordinated the delivery arrangements with the next hotel!
The taxi to Manzarares took us through beautiful countryside and even though the temperatures were up to 30 degrees there still were pockets of snow in the high mountains. It's very easy to forget, by the way, that Madrid is up on a height and that when you leave it you are in the mountains.
Manzanares el Real to Cercidilla
The owner of the hotel in Manzanares recommended Cinco Herraduras, a place for lunch and only a short walk from the hotel. Having arrived early we ordered lunch and lunch turned into dinner. It was one of those days where we paused, said to hell with it, let life slow down and all was well and all that was not well could be quietly discussed.
The following day the others left early and I left late because I wanted to manage the bag transfer and felt I needed to be there, just in case the transfer wouldn’t work and it would be necessary for me to travel by Taxi with the bags. The hotel was small and the owner was not there all the time ( a growing and unwelcome trend ) so you managed with a code sent to your phone. As it happened there was someone there that morning and I could leave the bags in her care for transportation to the next stop and step out onto the road.
This road is now, really well marked with yellow arrows and at all those important points where you’re faced with choices and uncertainty, there was an arrow or a stone available. This is the work, I think, of the Amigos of the Camino de Madrid and it is brilliant. It is so reassuring and so different to my first day’s walk , where I was obviously walking the wrong road.
All day, I walked alongside the Sierra de Guadaramma and in particular the mountain range called La Pedriza. The rock is granite – like the Mournes - and wonderfully, dramatically, shape-shiftingly, eroded. All along the path are the dry stone walls, the flowers and the birdsong.
There was a good breeze. My luggage transfer issues are well behind me. I’m travelling light. This day there was just one beautiful place after another and it's a frizzling continuum of insect life, butterflies, and swallows flitting in and out of blue skies; they’re living on the wing and what a way to live. And birds of prey were hovering, pausing and proving that a pause is not a stop but may be the prelude to an explosive burst of energy. The path is in full flower.
Chesterton said that if you wanted to understand Francis of Assisi’s relationship with nature it was to understand that he was in a constant state of being in love. I understand this to mean that Francis was as high as a kite! He had broken through the illusion of disconnectedness with Nature.
I was fairly high on nature myself that day. Everything was bright and brilliant. Although there are two very welcome stops for refreshment on this journey, at Mataelpino and Navacerrada, most of my energy was coming from elsewhere.
I was in the groove and I could have walked on and on.
This stage has notes of La Rioja and Navarra but it is its own place entirely and one of the great Camino Walks.
Finally I arrived down in the little town of Cercedilla. This is clearly a skiing centre in the winter and feels slightly alpine.
The day finishes in the restaurant of the Hostal La Maya with chuletillas de Cordero and some salad, a red wine and fresh pineapple for dessert.
There are only a very few pilgrims in the town and none in our Hostal. It's like the Camino of the old days and we are not tourist consumers we are pilgrims just passing through.
From Cercedilla to Segovía
Gronze gives this as a 30.2km stage crossing the Sierra de Guadajara, ascending to 1,796 metres(the highest point on all the Caminos in Spain), and then a descent into Segovía and I have the impression that the final stages are without any shade! There is just one stopping point for early on, too early on, at Las Dehesas. Or so it appeared.
We were reluctant to attempt the journey. The heat was building up and it looked as if there was no shelter at all for the last third of the journey.
We decided against attempting this crossing of the Sierra de Guadalajara on this occasion and perhaps returning at a cooler time of the year.
At a café in the Cercedilla that morning a man who lived in the village warned us of the need for plenty of water, good UV protecting clothes and sunscreen if we were attempting the crossing. He had done the journey on horseback and a cow or bull lunged at his horse. He warned us of the great danger of getting between a cow and her calf. They don’t de-horn cattle here and I saw them wandering freely on this part of the Camino from Madrid.
As I write this, I now realize that there is a bailout option on this route and that by walking a detour of 3 to 4 km you can break the journey at Valsaín or La Pradera de Navalhorno where, according to Gronze, there is accommodation. This leaves a return journey the next day and after that 11.5 km to Segovía. I look forward to trying the crossing that way – in two parts.
Lessons learned
A good map is necessary and or a guide book to find the proper path from Madrid and don’t be tempted to use map apps – they spoil the experience and they mislead you although I fully accept that they are useful in an emergency as is AlertCop.
The best way to do this route seems to be by carrying your own bag and by staying in hostels where good information always flows freely.
If bags are to be carried by taxi , then it might be best to try to make bookings from home and in that situation it might be easier to stay in hotels.
This is an attempt at dialogue not a guide nor is it advice and I would welcome other views on this special camino.
Turlough O’Donnell
06.08.2026
