Aranjuez is the town where Spain's kings went to get away from Madrid, and it has been laid out like a long, formal garden ever since. The royal palace, begun in the sixteenth century under Philip II and finished in the eighteenth, stands on the banks of the Tajo, surrounded by parks, canals, avenues of plane trees and orchards, and the whole landscape was added to the UNESCO list in 2001. The setting is exceptional: after miles of dry plain, the green of the river valley is a shock.
The town is famous for strawberries and asparagus, grown in the fertile riverside fields, and in spring the restaurants fill with people eating them, often with a glass of cold white wine. The composer Joaquín Rodrigo wrote his famous guitar concerto, the Concierto de Aranjuez, in 1939, and the slow movement is one of the most loved pieces of Spanish music. If you hear it in your head while crossing the river, you will not be the first.
The point lies seven kilometres from the town, near the little villages of Ciruelos and Ontígola. Ontígola has an old reservoir, the Mar de Ontígola, a lake created in the sixteenth century to supply the royal gardens, and a pleasant spot for birds. The ride back from the Gredos mountains passes through a landscape of dry plains and low hills, which seems quite empty after the peaks and forests of the sierra, and the road runs long and straight under a huge sky.
Aranjuez has about fifty-four thousand people, with plenty of fuel stations, supermarkets and restaurants, and is the natural place to stop. Ciruelos, with a few hundred inhabitants, has little. Aim to arrive in the evening, when the stone of the palace turns rose-gold and the gardens are cool. A walk under the trees, with the sound of water, is a gentle end to a long day on the road. In high summer, the heat in the valley can be intense.