Jesus and Mariangeles picked me up early outside my pension
for the trip out of town for the weekend . Well, early for Spaniards, this is.
It was around 8:00 A.M. and not particularly early in the morning for an early
start to a weekend away for Americans, but Spaniards love to stay out late and
sleep in late on the weekends. We drove north from Madrid on the highway to
Manzanares El Real, Jesus’s family’s hometown where they did some food shopping,
we all had churros con chocolate, and then stopped briefly at the family house
at the edge of Sierra de Guadarrama National Park.


Then it was up, up, and away on a two lane road that climbed
high into thick pine-forest in the Sierra de Guadarrama, one of the higher
mountain ranges in central Spain that separates Madrid from the region of
Castille-Leon and towns like Segovia and Avila on the other side of the range.
My hosts were eager to take me to Segovia, the nearest historic city in that
direction, and I was eager to see the city again even though I had been there as
a daytrip in 2001 on my Thanksgiving week trip to Madrid with my brother
because it is so spectacular.


Madrid is a high altitude city by European standards to
begin with, and I estimate we probably climbed to about 5,000 feet altitude as
we passed over the range before beginning the significant descent towards
Segovia, one of Spain’s highest provincial capitals at around 3,000 feet
elevation .


We stopped for a few hours at the Palacio La Granja de San
Ildefonso, one of the many royal palaces in the region around Madrid. My
understanding is the word granja in Spanish is similar to grange or farm, and
the place served as a kind of country getaway for the royals. The palace
exterior is in the restrained and elegant Habsburg style of the Renaissance
era, somewhat similar to the buildings around the Plaza Mayor in Madrid and
many of the public buildings dating from the era in Castille. The Habsburgs
weren’t so restrained in their rather over-the-top interior decorating style
and made the most of the gold from the colonies by gilding every surface they
could. La Granja, though, is fairly restrained in the interior, at least
compared with the gaudy extremes of the Palacio Real in Madrid from what I can
recall from my 2001 visit. Unfortunately, the Spanish state does not allow photographs
inside its public museums, so I don’t have any pictures of the inside just like
I wasn’t able to take any in the Reina Sofia Museum.


Probably the most impressive things about La Granja are its
extensive terraced gardens and water features, which frame the palace
beautifully and also create a wonderful view out towards the hills of the
Sierra Guadarrama. Then it was onwards a few miles down the road to Segovia.