El Molar

The 45-Minute City Detox

Fifty kilometres north of Madrid’s Plaza de Castilla, the A-1 motorway squeezes from eight lanes down to two. Keep left at junction 50, climb the slip road, and the city’s white apartment blocks vanish behind a ridge of Aleppo pines. You’ve reached El Molar, a village that measures altitude in metres (835) rather than storeys and where the evening soundtrack is church bells, not ambulance sirens. The temperature drops three degrees on the drive up; locals claim you can feel your pulse slow at the same rate.

This is commuter-belt Spain, but not as the Costas know it. The weekly influx is made up of teachers who work in the capital and return each night to stone houses with firewood stacked in the hall, plus a handful of British walkers who’ve twigged that the newly way-marked Camino del Anillo starts here. Tolkien branding aside, the 122 km loop is simply a chain of old shepherd paths that circles the Sierra Norte foothills. You can walk one section and hop on a morning bus back to Madrid, or book the church-run bunkhouses (€275 full board) and complete the circuit over six days. Either way, you’ll share the trail with more Iberian magpies than people.

A Village That Still Runs on Lunchtime

El Molar’s high street is 300 m long and obeys an unbreakable timetable: open at 07:00 for coffee, bolt the doors at 14:00, reopen when the shadows stretch across the square. Try to buy bread mid-afternoon and you’ll find the bakery owner asleep in a deck-chair, newspaper over his face. The only place that doesn’t shut is the Coviran supermarket, where stock arrives on Tuesdays and sells out by Friday. Weekend visitors learn to shop early or improvise dinner from tinned asparagus and the local red labelled simply Vinos de Madrid – Sierra Norte – lighter than Rioja, perfect chilled five minutes in the mountain stream behind the football pitch.

Architecture is practical rather than pretty. Granite footings, timber balconies painted the colour of bulls’ blood, and the odd Modernista flourish that someone wealthy added in 1923 then thought better of. The 16th-century church tower serves as the village clock; if you stand at the junction of Calle Real and Calle del Medio you can see the bells through the open arch, still rung by hand on feast days. Inside, the nave smells of candle wax and the stone floor dips where centuries of farmers have paused on their way to market.

Walking Tracks, Horse Hooves and Silence

Three minutes’ walk from the last house, the tarmac turns to sandy track. This is the Cañada Real Soriana, a drove road that once carried sheep from Cuenca to summer pastures. Follow it east and you drop gently towards the Jarama river, poplars replacing pines, bee-eaters rattling overhead. The river itself is a disappointment – trickling and fenced off by tomato farmers – but the birdlife compensates: kingfishers in winter, hoopoes in May, and black kites that circle above the rubbish tip like they own the place.

Prefer height to water? Head west on the gravel lane signed Cerro del Moro. A forty-minute plod gains 250 m and places you on a sandstone ridge where the whole Madrid meseta opens out. You can pick out the Cuatro Torres office blocks on a clear day, tiny silver staples against the brown plain. Bring a windproof; even in June the breeze carries the memory of snow from the Guadarrama peaks.

Horse-riding is the other local transport. The Centro Hipico on the village edge will hire placid mares by the hour (€25) and lead you along pine-firebreaks where wild thyme snaps under hoof. They provide hard hats; you provide jeans and a sense of humour when the horse stops dead to scratch its nose on a gatepost.

Roast Lamb and Other Monday Disasters

Food is Castilian: roast lamb (cordero asado) that arrives with a jacket of crackling, judiones beans the size of conkers, and chuletón T-bones designed for two but claimed by one hungry farmer. El Patio de los Olivos does the best version; book even for lunch or you’ll find the door locked – the chef decides custom by looking up the street and guessing. Vegetarians get patatas revolconas (paprika mash) and a plate of pimientos de padrón; the green peppers are locally grown and one in ten still bites back.

Don’t order coffee at 16:55. The waiter will already have stacked the chairs and mopped around your feet. Spanish closing times are enforced with military precision; if you want caffeine after five, walk to the Bar Central on Plaza de España where the owner keeps an ancient espresso machine humming until the coro practice ends at 20:30.

When to Come, and When to Stay Away

April and late-September are the sweet spots. Wildflowers or autumn colour, 22 °C afternoons, empty trails. May can be perfect too, but the romería to San Isidro brings tractors draped in flowers and a brass band that rehearses outside your bedroom window at 07:00. August is furnace-hot; thermometers touch 38 °C and the pine woods smell like someone left the barbecue on. Winter is crisp, often sunny, but daylight is gone by 18:00 and the bus back to Madrid may be cancelled if the pass above Pedrezuela gets sleet.

There are no hotels, only three casas rurales (weekend rate around €90 for the whole house) and the church bunkhouse used by walkers. If every bed is full, the nearest accommodation is 15 km away in Buitrago – charming, but you lose the night-time silence that makes the detour worthwhile.

The Honest Verdict

El Molar is not a film set. Modern brick houses creep up the southern approach, teenagers ride motorbikes past the church, and someone’s uncle parks a broken tractor in full view. What you get instead is functional Spain unplugged: bread that was dough at dawn, a bar where the owner remembers how you take your coffee from a visit three years ago, and paths where the loudest sound is a jay telling you to get off his oak branch. Spend a morning wandering, an afternoon on the ridge, and you’ll return to Madrid showered, sun-flushed, faintly smelling of rosemary – city stress sluiced off in 45 minutes of mountain air.