Cobeña

The thermometer on the pharmacy wall reads 4 °C at nine on a February morning, yet the sky above the petrol station is already hard cobalt. At 675 m above sea-level, Cobeña sits high enough on the Meseta for the air to carry a knife-edge clarity that London rarely manages. Thirty kilometres north of Madrid’s Plaza de Castilla, the capital’s exhaust simply drifts away; what remains is the smell of damp earth from the surrounding cereal fields and, on weekdays, the low hum of traffic heading to Barajas airport.

Most British visitors encounter the village only because the sat-nav coughs up “Cobeña” when they type “cheap hotel near Terminal 4”. The A-1 ribbons past, feeding a linear retail park of budget chains, car-hire yards and 24 h cafés that could belong to any European outskirts. What the booking sites rarely mention is that a five-minute drive beyond the neon signs brings you to the original settlement: a grid of single-storey houses, whitewashed walls and terracotta roofs that still follows the outline drawn in the 1560s.

Between runway and furrow

The contrast is instructive. Leave the hotel car park, cross the N-100 roundabout, and the tarmac narrows into Calle Real. Suddenly you are on a pavement wide enough for two abreast, passing grocers that close for siesta and a bakery whose window displays rosquillas the size of cricket balls. The road climbs gently to the Plaza Mayor – a rectangle of bare granite pavers flanked by the Iglesia de San Pedro Apóstol. The church tower, rebuilt in 1892 after a lightning strike, is visible from kilometres away across the plains; inside, the retablo is a sober Baroque piece, gilded but not flashy, paid for by farmers who had done well selling wool to Flemish merchants.

Walk twenty paces south of the square and the houses stop. Asphalt gives way to a camino of compacted clay that slices between two cerezo orchards. In April the blossom drifts across the track like late snow; by July the same branches are loaded with fruit that locals sell from honesty tables at €2 a kilo. The path is flat, stroller-friendly, and within ten minutes you have left the commuter belt behind. To the east the land drops into the Jarama valley, a ribbon of poplars and tamarisks; westward the plateau stretches uninterrupted all the way to Segovia’s sierra, forty kilometres distant. On a clear spring evening the snow on the Guadarrama catches the sun like a streak of neon.

What the airport hotels don’t tell you

Staying here is cheap – doubles from €55 if you book the ibis or the slightly more cheerful Be Live, both within 800 m of the A-1 exit. Yet the saving comes with caveats. There is no evening “scene”: restaurants shut by 23:00, and the single bar still serving after that fills up with long-haul cabin crew on Madrid turnarounds. British business reviewers who arrive expecting a pint-and-pie pub are disappointed; instead they find Cafetería Los Arcos grilling morcilla burgers that taste better than they photograph. If you need gluten-free supplies, the nearby Mercadona stocks an entire aisle, labels translated into English, useful for coeliac travellers who have tired of explaining sin trigo in city centre cafés.

Transport can trip you up. The regional bus 250 departs Plaza de Castilla every thirty minutes and reaches Cobeña in 35, but the last return leaves at 23:30. Miss it and a taxi to the village costs €45–€60. Car hire is straightforward – all the major desks operate from the airport hub – yet remember to refuel locally before drop-off; the Repsol on Cobeña’s main drag undercuts airport prices by roughly ten cents a litre, enough for a coffee and those rosquillas.

A calendar of small explosions

Fiestas here are less marketing exercise than survival mechanism. The patronal week of San Pedro, fixed to the nearest weekend to 29 June, sees the plaza converted into an open-air verbenas. Plastic tables spill across the granite, grandparents dance pasodobles beside toddlers clutching fluorescent wands, and at 02:00 everyone shuffles home before the 05:30 bread van arrives. August adds a low-key summer fair with outdoor cinema and a paella cooked in a pan two metres wide; tickets are €5 and you queue with a plastic plate. Come October the jornadas micológicas celebrate the arrival of wild mushrooms – mostly níscalos brought in from the Guadarrama slopes. A tasting menu in the parish hall (three courses, water and wine) costs €18; you sit at long tables under fluorescent light and listen to mycologists warn about the lethal Amanita phalloides. It is unglamorous, informative, and oversubscribed by locals – visitors need to book at the town hall desk.

When the plateau turns nasty

Winter deserves respect. Elevation means frost can linger until ten, and the wind that barrels across the plateau is sharp enough to make a mockery of a Barbour jacket. January night-time lows dip to –5 °C, and when snow falls in the sierra the village road becomes a skating rink; the council grits only the main drag, leaving the agricultural tracks to hard-packed ice. Summer, by contrast, is a furnace. July averages 33 °C, shade is scarce on the caminos, and the airport hotels’ pools fill with grounded crew pretending they are on holiday. The sweet spot is April–May, when day temperatures hover around 22 °C and the fields flicker green with young wheat, or mid-September to mid-October when the light softens and the first cocido of the season appears on lunch menus.

Walking without a rucksack

You do not need OS-standard boots. A loop south past the Ermita de la Soledad and back along the Camino de los Molinos is 5 km, entirely on flat clay. Add an extra 3 km by continuing to the Jarama ford at El Vellón, where herons pick among the reeds and the only sound is the click of irrigation gates. Cyclists can follow the old cañada real sheep-track north-west toward Valdeolmos; the surface is hard enough for hybrids, and traffic is limited to the occasional tractor hauling hay. No one sells water en route – fill bottles at the plaza fountain before setting out.

The honest verdict

Cobeña will never compete with the limestone drama of the Picos or the tiled swagger of Andalucía. What it offers is a snapshot of how Madrid’s periphery thins into working countryside: a place where hotel guests in EasyJet uniforms drink café con leche beside farmers in Boinas who still keep chickens behind their houses. Treat it as an overnight staging post and you will find clean beds, decent churros and an easy escape onto open tracks. Arrive expecting cobbled romance and you will leave early, muttering about “Spain’s answer to a Travelodge strip”. The village does not mind either way – it has been watching strangers pass since the 1500s, and the plateau wind soon blows the grumbles back towards the motorway.