El Escorial

The 664 granite steps inside the monastery basilica are worn smooth by leather soles, not hiking boots. Yet most visitors reach them after a climb of another sort: the slow bus ascent from Madrid’s plain to 909 m, where the air thins just enough to make the mouth dry and the stone seem colder than it should. El Escorial sits on this natural plinth as if placed there to prove a point—mountain life and imperial power can share the same draught.

Stone that remembers

Philip II chose this ridge in 1563 because his father, Charles V, had once hunted boar here and liked the wind. The result, San Lorenzo de El Escorial (the monastery technically lies in the adjoining town, though the two have merged in all but municipal pride), is still the largest single building in Spain. British travellers have never known quite what to make of it. Dr Johnson’s contemporary, the clergyman Edward Clarke, called it “a large, confused, stupendous pile”; Richard Ford later dismissed the same walls as “vast and useless”. Modern opinion has softened—TripAdvisor ranks the complex above four stars—but the place still carries what Jan Morris termed “the tragedy of Spain, her lack of fulfilment”. You feel it in the library’s dust-dry scent and in the Panteón de Reyes where the marble coffins sit in birth order, waiting.

Admission is €12 (£10.50) if bought online, a pound less than at the ticket window where queues coil by 10:30 even in February. Last entry is an hour before closing; Mondays are shut. Inside, photography is banned, so the memory of vaulted slate corridors and trompe-l’œil ceilings has to be carried out in your head, slightly unreal. Allow two hours minimum; three if you intend to count every Hieronymus Bosch in the gallery.

The town that isn’t the monument

Most day-trippers see nothing beyond the monastery gates, which is convenient for the 5,000 residents of El Escorial proper. Their streets begin where the coach parks end, climbing gently among Cotswold-grey stone and terracotta that works better under snow than English heritage paint ever manages. Slate roofs overhang the pavements, directing winter melt into gutters fast enough to power the old public laundry troughs still fed by mountain springs. In summer the same troughs give off a cool breath that smells of wet granite and pine resin.

Calle Floridablanca, the commercial spine, measures barely 400 m yet squeezes in three bakeries, a shop selling shepherd’s crooks and a tiny bookshop specialising in railway timetables. Mid-week lunch menus hover round €11 (£9.60) for three courses and a half-bottle of house wine; weekend prices jump the moment the Madrid number plates appear. Try La Cueva for roast kid—spring only—or El Trece for cocido madrileño so thick the chickpeas stand upright. Vegetarians survive on tortilla and judiones bean stew, though you may be offered tuna as “it isn’t meat”.

Up into the sierra

Behind the basilica’s dome the ground keeps rising. A fifteen-minute walk from the tourist office brings you to the start of the Camino de las Reales Fábricas, a 5 km contour that used to supply the monastery workshops with charcoal. Today it’s a gentle introduction to the Guadarrama, shaded by Pyrenean oaks and noisy with green woodpeckers. Serious boots are unnecessary, but trainers with grip help after rain; the local slate turns into something resembling black ice.

For more altitude, the track to Abantos (1,753 m) leaves from the same trailhead. The climb gains 650 m in 4 km—comparable to England’s Cat Bells but at twice the height—and tops out among broom and exposed granite that still bears the scars of Philip’s quarrymen. From the summit you can see Madrid’s towers 50 km away, shimmering like overheated pins, while vultures wheel below at eye level. In July the temperature differential between town and peak can exceed 12 °C; pack gloves even if breakfast was T-shirt weather.

Winter walkers should check the AEMET forecast: snow can fall from October and the habitual north wind funnels through the Lozoya valley at 60 kph. When that happens the monastery closes its upper terraces and the bus service switches to all-weather tyres, sometimes omitting the last evening run. On clear, cold days, however, the sierra turns crystalline and the entrance fee suddenly feels like a bargain.

Two small palaces and a chair

Halfway up Abantos road, a discreet sign points to the Casita del Príncipe, a neoclassical villa designed by Juan de Villanueva in 1772 for the future Charles IV. It is everything the great monastery is not: human in scale, painted Pompeian red, set among cedars and formal hedges that smell of rain on box. Admission is by guided tour only (hourly, €7/£6), but the gardens stay open until sunset and offer the best picnic lawn on the southern slope. Locals arrive at 19:00 in June, when the stone still holds the day’s heat and the light turns the granite walls honey-coloured.

Lower down, the Casita del Infante reprises the same elegance in miniature. Between the two, a ten-minute detour through oak scrub reaches the so-called Silla de Felipe II, a throne-shaped outcrop where the king supposedly sat to watch construction. The story is apocryphal—Philip’s gout would have made the scramble torture—but the view frames the entire complex as a single grey grid, uncompromising and unmistakably Spanish.

Getting there, getting away

Buses leave Madrid’s Moncloa station every 20–30 minutes; journey time is 45–55 minutes depending on mountain traffic, and an open return costs €8.40 (£7.30). Trains also run from Príncipe Pío on the C-3a line, but the timetable has contracted since 2020—verify the day before or you may spend an unplanned evening in the station café whose idea of dinner is crisps and caña beer. Drivers take the A-6 and exit at kilometre 47; the first sign says “San Lorenzo,” the second “El Escorial,” a distinction that has launched a thousand arguments in hire-car passenger seats. Underground parking beneath Avda. de los Reyes charges €1.80 per hour; after 15:00 on weekdays it’s free, but spaces vanish when the coach tours return for 17:00 communion.

When to come, when not to

April–June and mid-September to early-November give warm days, cool nights and mountain colour that shifts from broom yellow to oak rust. July and August are doable if you start early—monastery doors open at 10:00 sharp, so aim for the 08:30 bus—but the plateau sun is merciless and the stone reflects it like a toaster. December brings empty streets and possible snow; January can be brutal, though the sight of the basilica’s dome rising from frosted cypresses is worth the risk of numb fingers.

Rain is rarely torrential but when it arrives the slate underfoot becomes treacherous and the library’s 40,000 leather volumes give off a distinct aroma of wet dog. On such days locals retreat to Café Gaudí for hot chocolate thick enough to support a churro upright, and the mountain waits, patient and slightly ominous, behind drifting cloud.

Leave before nightfall and the town contracts back into itself: metal shutters roll down, swifts flick between rooflines, the granite glow fades to pewter. From the bus window the monastery recedes, still refusing to charm, still demanding to be understood. Whether you manage that in a day is doubtful; what lingers is the feel of altitude on your lungs and the sight of stone that has outlasted every opinion ever hurled at it.