It looks like I might be heading to Madrid in mid may for a couple of days – I’ve had a quick Google and the Casa de Campo park in the town centre seems to have some MTBing but are there any other places within easy (car-less) reach of the city that are worth looking at? We might be travelling light too so if there are any reccomendations for places to hire bikes that’d be handy.

The casa de Campo looked OK for light riding when I was over there at the end of the summer.

I printed out the responses to my thread about doing stuff in Madrid – I’ll have a hunt and pass on the recommendations – think someone mentioned a bike hire place.

In terms of other stuff – the Palace is free entry to EU citizens one day (I think its either tuesday or wednesday afternoons) and the art gallery with Picaso’s Guernica is also free one day of the week – worth going to see – I’ll hunt out the details when I get home tonight.

I like Madrid – Madrileños are great people and party hard – we found a great Tapas bar near where we were staying – I’ll get you the name of that as well.

Cheers Badger – anything you can dig out would be great ta. I visited the Reine Sofia about 10 years ago & was already planning to head back there for another dose of Guernica.

I’ll ask the wife, but I know there’s some cracking riding a few Km outside 😉

Just wondering if anyone’s got any further info?

TIA

You can get trains out to the mountains – they have a ski resort there, so we’re talking quite big mountains. There must be some great riding in them. Cotos was where we went.

Joe

Casa de Campo is IMO a great park for riding and very close to the city centre. El Pardo is another (much bigger) park to the North of the city which is just reachable from the centre if you know the way (30 min ride away).

Or you can get the train to Cercedilla in the mountains further North (train takes about 50 minutes I think) and there is loads of riding up there. Equally there are trains out to places like Tres Cantos and Las Rozas which are just outside Madrid and while they don’t have the big mountains of La Sierra there are plenty of routes.

As for bike hire, your best bet would be to get a demo bike – probably from Karacol or maybe Mammoth.

Give me a shout when you’re coming and I should be able to show you round some of the routes.