Toledo and Montes de Toledo
A 176 km loop
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Why this ride
Leave the city behind and spend the day on roads with texture. 176 km round from Madrid - plan on about 3 h 12 of riding. The plan has 1 food stop marked.
Roadbook
- Madrid
start
Madrid sits higher than any other capital in the European Union, around six hundred and fifty metres above the sea, on a dry plateau with the Sierra de Guadarrama as a blue-white wall to the north. That height explains the light, which is hard and clear, and the winters, which can be sharp, and the habit of the place, which is to stay up very late. The city was a modest town until 1561, when Philip II moved his court here, more or less because it was in the middle of Spain, and it has been the capital ever since. Everything grand about the centre, the palace, the Plaza Mayor and the Prado, grew out of that decision.
The Royal Palace, on the western edge of the old town, is a vast block of white stone and granite begun in the 1730s on the site of a burned fortress, and the square in front looks across a gardened slope toward the Casa de Campo, a former royal hunting ground that is now an enormous park. Walk a few minutes east and the Plaza Mayor, with its red arcades, is the place for a coffee and a bocadillo de calamares, the fried squid sandwich that is the city's cheerful signature. The Retiro park and the Prado museum lie farther along, and a day in them is a good use of a rest day.
Riding out of the capital is easier than it looks. The M-30 ring road and the radial motorways are fast and well signed, and the traffic, though thick, moves. Low-emission zones restrict older vehicles in the centre, so check the current rules and do not assume a bike is exempt. Once past the northern suburbs the land rises toward the sierra and the roads begin to bend, through holm oak and granite boulders, with mountain passes like Navacerrada and Cotos within an hour or so. Weekends are crowded with other riders, so weekdays or early starts help.
Fuel is no concern in a city of three million, and the centre has bars on every corner. Madrileños eat late, with lunch around two and dinner after nine, and the best cheap breakfast is chocolate con churros, thick hot chocolate with fried dough, at one of the old churrerías. In summer the afternoon heat is fierce, and the streets are empty between three and six, then fill again as the shadows lengthen. The smell of the city is hot pavement, coffee and, after a thunderstorm, wet dust.
- Toledo
food
Toledo sits inside a nearly closed loop of the Tagus, a granite gorge that makes the old city a natural fortress, and the first sight of it from the ring road is one that few riders forget. The Carretera de Circunvalación runs around the opposite bank, and its lay-bys and viewpoints, especially the Mirador del Valle, give the classic view: the Alcázar and cathedral on the skyline, the Alcántara bridge below, and the river shining in the gorge. El Greco painted that same view in the early seventeenth century, with stormy skies, and it is not hard to see why.
The city was the capital of the Visigothic kingdom, and later, for centuries, of Castile, and its reputation as a place where Christians, Muslims and Jews lived side by side, however imperfectly, is the source of its nickname, the city of three cultures. Its synagogues, mosques turned churches and Gothic cathedral are all within a few minutes' walk of each other. Toledo steel, which made the swords of kings, is still forged, and shops along the narrow lanes sell blades and damascene jewellery. The marzipan, mazapán de Toledo, is the sweet to try, made with almonds and sugar and sold in boxes in every pastry shop.
Riding in the old town is not a good idea. The lanes are steep and narrow, paved with slippery stone, and cars are restricted, so you should park outside the walls and walk. There are large car parks near the Puerta de Bisagra, and on the south bank, with a bank of escalators that lifts you up the hill. The roads that approach from Madrid and Aranjuez are mostly wide and fast, and the hills to the south, the Montes de Toledo, offer a quieter ride through holm oak and cork forests where deer and even a few lynx live.
The city has more than eighty thousand people, with fuel stations on all the main roads. In summer the heat is ferocious, and the best time to walk the old streets is early morning or late evening. A meal of partridge or venison stew, followed by marzipan, is a Toledan pleasure that costs more in tourist season, so look for the places a little off the main squares.
- Madrid finish