Community of Madrid

At the centre of the region, on the Manzanares, Madrid gathers the Prado and two other great art museums, the Royal Palace and old quarters of taverns and squares. Its two main stations, Atocha and Chamartín, send the commuter trains out to the towns of the region, and Barajas airport lies on the city's north-eastern edge.

About 50 kilometres north-west of Madrid, below the Guadarrama, San Lorenzo de El Escorial grew around the monastery Philip II built in the second half of the 16th century: a vast block of grey granite that is monastery, palace, basilica and royal burial place in one, inscribed with its site as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Beneath the high altar, the Pantheon of the Kings holds the tombs of most Spanish kings since Charles V; the library's long hall, under a painted barrel vault, shelves its books with their gilded edges turned outward; and Philip II's own small, plain rooms have a window onto the high altar. The commuter train stops at El Escorial, in the lower town, a walk uphill from the monastery.

The Guadarrama closes the region's northern horizon, and its high ground is the Sierra de Guadarrama National Park, shared with Segovia across the ridge. Cercedilla, at the end of a commuter line from Madrid, is the walkers' village at its foot, with marked paths up through the pine woods of the Fuenfría valley. Above it, the road climbs to the Puerto de Navacerrada, the pass down to the Bourbon palace and gardens of La Granja de San Ildefonso on the Segovia side, and runs on to the Puerto de Cotos, where the main path to Peñalara begins. At 2,428 metres Peñalara is the highest summit of the range, with the glacial lake of the Laguna Grande in the hollow below its eastern face. Between the two passes, the ski slopes of Valdesquí take the winter snow.

On the southern flank of the range, Manzanares el Real lies by the Santillana reservoir below the castle the Mendoza family built in the 15th century, a well-preserved fortress of round towers and battlements. Behind the town, La Pedriza, inside the national park, is a maze of granite domes, boulders and slabs with the young Manzanares running through it in clear pools. Paths climb among the rocks to views over the plain, and its walls have drawn climbers for generations.

From the Puerto de Cotos, the road drops into the green valley of the Lozoya. At Rascafría, the monastery of Santa María de El Paular, founded for Carthusian monks at the end of the 14th century and kept today by Benedictines, has its great cloister hung with Vicente Carducho's paintings of Carthusian lives, and a path from it follows the Aguilón stream up a granite gorge to the waterfall of the Cascada del Purgatorio. Downstream, where the valley meets the main road north to Burgos, Buitrago del Lozoya stands in a loop of the river inside its medieval walls, and a small museum there shows the works Picasso gave his barber, Eugenio Arias, a native of the town.

Beyond Buitrago, the Sierra Norte runs east into thinly peopled hill country of oak woods and small villages built of slate and stone, on the borders of Segovia and Guadalajara. Near Montejo de la Sierra, the Hayedo de Montejo, a beech wood on the upper Jarama, turns copper and gold from mid-October into November and is visited on guided walks booked ahead, with limited places. On the region's north-eastern edge, Patones de Arriba, a village of slate houses in a ravine, was left by its people for the valley below and has been restored, with restaurants in its old houses.

Alcalá de Henares, about 30 kilometres east of Madrid by commuter train, is the birthplace of Miguel de Cervantes and the first city planned around a university, the one Cardinal Cisneros founded at the end of the 15th century; town and university are a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The Colegio Mayor de San Ildefonso, the old university's main college, has a plateresque stone façade, and in its paraninfo, the ceremonial hall, the King presents the Cervantes Prize for literature each April. Calle Mayor runs through the old town between arcades on both sides, past the Museo Casa Natal de Cervantes, which recreates the house of his birth as a home of his time. The cathedral and the Corral de Comedias, a playhouse of the early 17th century that still stages plays, are a short walk away, and white storks nest on the towers.

About 50 kilometres south-east of Madrid, Chinchón is built around its Plaza Mayor, an irregular, roughly round square enclosed by houses of three storeys whose long wooden balconies look down on it; during the town's summer fiestas the square is closed off as a bullring. Above it stand the great church of the Asunción and the ruined castle of the counts of Chinchón. A few kilometres to the south-east, Colmenar de Oreja has an arcaded Plaza Mayor of its own.

Aranjuez lies about 50 kilometres south of Madrid, where the Jarama meets the Tagus, and its royal palace, where the court spent the spring, stands among gardens, tree-lined avenues and market gardens that form a cultural landscape inscribed by UNESCO. The palace, begun for Philip II and completed by the Bourbons in the 18th century, is visited for its state rooms and its porcelain room, walled in porcelain from the royal factory of the Buen Retiro. The Jardín de la Isla lies on an island between the palace and the river, and the Jardín del Príncipe follows the Tagus downstream under old plane trees. Commuter trains from Atocha take under an hour, and Toledo, in Castilla-La Mancha, is under an hour's drive further on.

In the far west, among the foothills of the Sierra de Gredos, San Martín de Valdeiglesias is the main town of the western vineyards of the Vinos de Madrid appellation, planted with old Garnacha and the white Albillo Real. A 15th-century castle stands over the town, and on the San Juan reservoir nearby Madrileños swim and sail on summer weekends. The appellation's other vineyards spread around Navalcarnero, south-west of the capital, and Arganda del Rey, to the south-east, where Tempranillo and the white Malvar are grown. San Martín is about an hour's drive from Madrid, and the wineries are small, so a visit is best arranged ahead.