This was a seven week road trip that would result in an impossibly long single piece so, as with other long trips, for convenience it has been divided into eight separate posts. The several Parts will be published, in order, at regular intervals over successive weeks.
Part 1: Prelude, Structure of the Trip and Practicalities
Part 2: Catalonia (Aiguablava) and Madrid
Part 7: The North West: Puebla de Sanabria, Cambados and Pontevedra
Part 8: The North West: Ferrol, Santiago de Compostela and Heading Home
CATALONIA: AIGUABLAVA
Length of Stay: 1 Night
As mentioned in Part 1, I am not going to cover the week we spent in a rental villa in Catalonia but I will just touch on our first night in Spain, which we spent in the Parador de Aiguablava (https://paradores.es/en/parador-de-aiguablava). This modern Parador sits in a pretty spectacular location on a peninsula above the eponymous village and its small beach. This region of coast north of Barcelona, the Costa Brava, is an area that had not drawn us in the past – too many associations with a different sort of holiday from those we enjoy – but this stretch, about two hours drive north of the city is a seriously attractive area of rugged coastline, small coves and resort-free tourism. It is a place of lower rise housing (many, I suspect, second or rental homes) and small hotels embedded within a wooded landscape, all set on steep-sided hills above the Mediterranean. Roads kink back and forth and spiral down to exquisite little sandy beaches. There are touristy cafes and restaurants, but this is no Lloret del Mar or its ilk.
The Parador is open and spacious and the room design echoes the clean-lined, straightforward design of the public areas. We ate in the bar where there was a reasonable selection of small plates for tired travellers and where the sense is that they could have done with at least one more person to reduce both the waiting times for service and the seeming anxiety levels of the existing staff. All the rooms look out over the sea and ours had a balcony for supping the view. The chill on the April air militated against lingering outside unless you were sitting in the sun which, fortunately for us, was gracing the location that day. We were moving on to the rental villa the next day but we felt it would have been easy to stay longer to enjoy both the location and the Parador.
Mobility Access
Having said that, you would not want to be here without a car. It is a seriously steep walk down to the beach through the woods, although there is a stone-paved path with wooden handrails that takes you there. Likewise any walk out of the hotel involves walking on uneven paths through the woods. The area around the hotel, a paved terrace with tables, loungers and the like, is not large before the cliffs drop steeply down to the sea or slopes rise into the surrounding woods. A place for relaxed lingering and looking but less so for exercise, if you have difficulty with rough ground or slopes.
Within the hotel there are no issues, with slopes catering for any level changes in the public areas and lifts to all floors. The car drop off area is open, paved and flat. The only wrinkle is that car-parking at the entrance level is limited and cars may need to be parked in spaces that are fifty-plus metres down a steepish slope of the road from the entrance level.
MADRID
Length of Stay: 7 NIghts
So once again in a large urban centre our focus was the tennis and our choice of hotel and our other activities were built around pre-booked sessions at the Madrid Open. Madrid is a city we have visited on a few occasions in the past and I spent three months here back in the late 1970s, unsuccessfully trying to learn Spanish. Our non-tennis activities centred around things we had not done previously, thus I must apologise to those seeking information about key sights in the city that there is a certain niche-ness to this entry. For those, there is the usual plethora of information in other guides, blogs and websites but why not start with the city’s own tourist website which also has a useful section for the less mobile (Accessible Madrid – https://www.esmadrid.com/en/accessible-madrid#container).
At the risk of stating the obvious, because Madrid is a capital city, there is a wealth of ways it can be enjoyed and, as always for us, walking and sitting watching life revolve around you is one of the great pleasures of being in such an urban environment. It is a city that sits high on the Meseta Central, actually around 600 metres (2,000+ feet) above sea level and those more used to life at sea-level just need to take care, as moving around may be a little more effortful. That walk up a slope may induce more puffing than you are used to.
Places Visited and Activities
Fundación MAPFRE Exhibition Halls
MAPFRE is a Spanish multinational insurance group which set up a cultural foundation which now has exhibition spaces in Barcelona and the one we visited, which was near the north end of Madrid’s so-called Golden or Museum Mile. Well, only so known to outsiders, as most Madrileños would no more know how far was a mile than most New Yorkers would know how far was a kilometre. The draw for us was that the revolving exhibitions focus heavily on photography and, on this occasion, a retrospective of the work of Swedish street and documentary photographer, Christer Strömholm (https://stromholm.com). There was also an extensive exhibition of Marc Chagall’s work which provided an engaging counterpoint to the black and white photography of Strömholm. It is a well-structured modern exhibition space in an elegant 19th century former palace. It is well worth a look at their website to check the latest exhibitions if art and photography are part of your rationale for a stay (https://www.fundacionmapfre.org/en/art-and-culture/exhibitions/recoletos-hall/).
Mobility Access
As it was opened in 2008 as an exhibition space those with mobility constraints should have no issue here. There is a lift to reach the upper exhibition floor. We did not check out wheelchair availability on this occasion and it is a pity the website has no accessibility information. There are not many seats available in the exhibition spaces. If you pre-book a timed ticket queuing should be minimal, unless you arrive well in advance of your time in which case you have the option to loiter in shade in the courtyard outside. No seats here but if you cross over to the pedestrian element of the tree-lined boulevard there is plentiful seating (on benches and low walls) and the Café Gijon is just 150 metres south with both outdoor and indoor seating.
It is only a 300 metre walk from Colon Metro station on the 4 line. Recoletos train station, which is part of the train network that includes commuter services that serve the suburbs, is just across the wide boulevard, Paseo de Recoletos. The principal concern for those wanting to use the station is that there are only a few interlink stations between the Metro and the commuter rail network and Recoletos is not one of them, so getting there from a central location such as Sol can be a bit fiddly. Conversely Paseo de Recoletos has six bus lines running in both directions from bus stops that are less than 200 metres from MAPFRE. The area all around here is flat and smoothly paved.
El Escorial and the Tren de Felipe II
Over half a million visitors a year trundle out to Real Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial (https://el-escorial.com), the full name of the Renaissance monastery and residence of the Spanish monarchs. The austere enormity that is Philip II’s monument to his Catholicism is 50 kilometres (31 miles) from the centre of the city. This is one of Madrid’s ‘do visit’ sites so I am not going to encourage you to go or the reverse. If you engage with history you will go, if you enjoy Renaissance architecture and religious art you will go, if you want to gawk at the sheer extravagance of royal living in past centuries you will go and if you enjoy formal gardens and sweeping views you will go. So, assuming you have made your choice, there are a number of options available for the visiting tourist – drive yourself, take local trains and buses, join a coach tour or, our choice, take an all-in tour on a not-quite-vintage train (https://www.trendefelipeii.com/en/). A wander through the website gives you most of the information you need about the train so I will confine this section to certain practicalities that we faced.
The first thing that is not apparent from the website is that this is very much a theme-park style of trip with staff done up in period costumes that range across the centuries (a 1930s train conductor alongside a woman of Philip II’s late-sixteenth century court) entertaining both the queue at Principe Pio station and, on board, the many children along for the ride. The next is to note that, despite the English language section of the website, the tour is essentially carried out in Spanish. Yes, many of the staff speak English (of course they do) and can answer your queries, but most of the tourists are Spaniards. Once they had established that there were some English speakers on board (us), explanations and instructions came in both languages but, critically, the tour of El Escorial itself is conducted in Spanish. This was not apparent to us when we booked online. Fortunately we solved the problem by taking our El Escorial tickets from the tour leader and making our own way around the complex.
The tour covers the whole day departing in the morning and returning in late afternoon. The train runs to the station of El Escorial from whence a coach ferries you up to the town’s bus station. You walk to the monument to begin the tour and, at the end of the tour there is time to take in the formal gardens, the nearby eateries and souvenir shops and to make your way back to the train station for the return. The coach reverses its trip back to the station, but you can also walk down the hill to the rail station through the park and gardens of the Casita del Principe, an elegant semi-formal park with an eighteenth century ‘house’ sitting in the lower reaches. All of which points to another factor that needs to be borne in mind when taking this trip.
Mobility Access
Some real forethought is needed before embarking on this tour. Principe Pio station is easily accessible by Metro and bus, but a drop off at the bus stop or from a taxi still leaves you with a walk (which includes negotiating a flight of steps within the concourse) to reach the departure gate for the Tren de Felipe II. There are only half-a-dozen seats in the vicinity of the departure gate and no cafés very close by. As seats on the train are allocated with your ticket, in theory, you could arrive just before the departure time and avoid having to stand around. There is also an almost inevitable element of standing around as coaches are boarded and entry for groups is arranged. Little queues for security checks add time spent standing and shuffling. The walk from the bus station to the El Escorial main building is about 750 metres. And that main building is truly vast, being a rectangle 225 by 175 metres. This means walking around inside across the four main floors involves covering substantial distances and when you add in the changes of level within, linked only by stone staircases, you have a place that is extremely difficult for the mobility constrained to negotiate. In addition there are two entrances: the main entrance is in the north façade and, a further 200 metres around on the west façade, the entrance used by tour groups. None of this appears on the website nor does the information that they do have wheelchairs available (https://el-escorial.com).
We used one, as otherwise seeing any part of the interior would have been impractical for us. You go to the main entrance which, because of the length of the walk from the bus station, we reached by taxi. There is still a walk across the open plaza that wraps around the north and west façades but that is only about 40 metres. They will let you take the wheelchair around the plaza to go to the group entrance which gives access to the courtyard to the basilica and you could also take it across the plaza to access the formal gardens that run around the other two façades. The gardens have terraces that give stirring views across the high plain and down to a distant Madrid city. The wheelchair limits your visit to the ground floor areas, ruling out access to the royal apartments, library and the pantheon where generations of royal bones lie. Access to these requires the use of lengthy staircases. Outside, the plaza and gardens are flat with changes of level made using gentle slopes. However, the wide plaza is far from smooth. The large, paved stones are curved down at the edges meaning wheelchairs need to take it quite slowly. The formal gardens have paths that are that packed gravel that can also be found in so many French and Spanish public urban spaces, as in El Retiro park here in Madrid or the Jardin de Tuileries in Paris. Smooth and perfectly manageable.
A final warning about reaching the building from the station. I have seen some websites assert it is a 15-minute walk from one to the other. This is a distance of around 1,800 metres. It took me between 20 and 25 minutes to walk from El Escorial through the Park Casita del Principe to the station and that was downhill. There is a long steady slope all the way up from the station and you are at an altitude of just over 1,000 metres (3,400 feet) when you reach the building.
I have gone into this in such detail because we felt a visit to this extraordinary place is well worthwhile provided you accept the limitations your mobility may impose. The train is fun, despite the language limitations, not least because the old-style corridor trains have an eight-seat configuration in the compartments meaning a camaraderie develops with fellow travellers. In our case two young Spanish couples and their respective children were enjoyable companions despite our respective language limitations. And one couple had come from Salamanca and, finding we were planning to visit their home town later in our trip, gave us some pointers for places to visit and eat when we were there.
Espacio Cultural Serreria Belga and CaixaForum Madrid
https://www.serreria-belga.es/en and https://caixaforum.org/es/madrid
These two lesser-known cultural centres with rotating exhibitions in their gallery space are set in the Museum Mile area, equidistant between the artistic giants of the Museos Nacionales of del Prado and Centro de Arte Reina Sofia. Set in a side street about 250 metres from Estación del Arte Metro stop, they provide a fascinating architectural contrast. Serreria Belga is a nineteenth century former sawmill, recently re-purposed by Madrid city council, whilst the CaixaForum is a twenty-first century building designed by Herzog & de Meuron. Both are described as cultural spaces which include rotating art and photography exhibitions. We had been drawn by a photography exhibition in the former but enjoyed just wandering around taking in the architectural styles of interiors and exteriors. Neither are huge. The Serreria Belga looked as if work was continuing on parts of the facility as signage and staff (for guidance) were thin on the ground. Nevertheless the exhibition was easily accessed, as the space is the main ground floor of the old sawmill entered from the courtyard that sits at the rear of the older structure. These places are an interesting diversion if you are in the area, whether or not there is an exhibition that chimes with your likes.
Mobility Access
The ground floor exhibition space at Serreria Belga is neither problematic nor large. The CaixaForum is a fully accessible modern structure. As well as Estación del Arte Metro stop there are several bus stops within a couple of hundred metres in the streets leading away from the large road junction in front of Atocha station.
Laundromat
La Colada Express
Those who have read other posts will know that we have a minor obsession with laundromats; places that take us to parts of cities we may not otherwise have gone that offer a different viewpoint on urban life. Plus we have a dislike of paying hotel prices for washing, particularly on longer trips. Here we are then, on a fresh Sunday morning, piling our first load into the one remaining unused machine at this tiny establishment a mere 300 metres from our hotel. This section of the city, south of the plaza at Callao, is an understated area of narrower winding streets hemmed in by six or seven storey buildings from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Small shops and eating and drinking places of all varieties fill the ground floor spaces and the laundromat clientele was a mix of locals and tourists. The norm in Spanish laundromats seems to be to include washing powder in the cost (the machine loads it by some unseen process). Oddly whilst the machines could be paid for with credit/debit cards the dryers required coins, but a change machine by the door provided the needful.
Tennis: Madrid Open Masters 1000
Time to move on to the next section if tennis watching is not your thing. Readers will know it is one of ours. A key element in the European clay court season that leads up to the French Open, this tournament attracts nearly all the top players and if the local emphasis is on their national favourites Nadal (taking an emotional farewell in his last year before retiring) and Alcaraz (going out to an unexpected defeat by Rublev, the eventual men’s winner) that is understandable. The tournament is shared between women and men, giving an opportunity (outside the Grand Slam tournaments) to see the best players on both women’s and men’s tours. And we were lucky enough to see the women’s final between Świątek and Sabalenka that was widely regarded as one of the best matches of the year. The venue is a modern, purpose-built facility called the Caja Mágica located about a 20 minute taxi drive south of the centre of the city. The Caja Mágica is also repurposed for other events through the year. Purchasing tickets online for five separate sessions several months ahead of time was very straightforward using the Open’s own website (https://tickets.mutuamadridopen.com/mutuamadridopen/en_US/entradas/evento/35375). The tournament tickets are divided between day (play starts at 13.00) and night (play starts at 20.00) sessions and, on the show courts, you would expect to see two matches per session.
The three main courts can be covered so no play on those is lost to rain. And rain it did at some of the times we were there. With evening temperatures dropping close to 8°C (46°F) as it did for one evening session, it can get pretty cold inside the arena as well as outside. Within the facility around the two main courts there are many stalls for food and drink…and gelato. As so often at sports facilities the offer isn’t the best but, here at least there is the odd salad to be hunted down amongst the pizzas, burgers, bocadillos et al. The security people rigorously weed out every sniff of your own food and drink at the entrance and have you drop it in strategically placed bins, so you cannot bring your own water or healthy options. Queues at the stalls are usually okay except at the end of matches or sets. There are plenty of tables and chairs around the stalls and we found we could usually cadge one or two even at the busiest times. Likewise toilet facilities are plentiful.
Mobility Access
On the main court (Estadio Manolo Santana), unless you are in the expensive seats, there will be stairs to climb to reach yours. As there are no lifts, the higher up you are the more steps to climb. There are no handrails. At ground level all the facilities (entrance, food stalls, toilets) are on the same level which is flat and smooth and, largely under cover. When there are two sessions they do not allow you in to the facility for the evening session until 18.30 by which time a substantial queue has built up. There are very few places to sit around the facility entrance, so my suggestion would be to arrive half-an-hour after they open the barriers when the initial queue will have diminished.
The Madrid Open website has a section on getting there and getting about the facility (https://mutuamadridopen.com/en/visit-mutua-madrid-open/). Like many Spanish informative websites, it tends to terseness. So a few pointers. It is 900 metres from the nearest Metro stop at San Firmin Orcasur (Line 3) to the facility entrance, with the streets sloping gently down most of the way. The Metro stop does not have street to platform lift access. During the tournament there is a shuttle bus service from Legazpi Metro station (also on Line 3 and with lift access) to the Caja Mágica. With several central stops on Line 3 such as Sol, Callao and Plaza de España also having lift access, if the place you are staying is close to those Metro stops, this would be one way of minimising the amount of walking. Just be aware that the shuttle bus drops you at the car park on the east side of the facility and, from there, it is still a walk of around 350 metres to the entrance. Other bus stops serving the centre of the city are about 500-600 metres from the main entrance. All this militated against us using public transport. Getting a taxi was our chosen means of getting there. In central Madrid they are pretty plentiful and we had few difficulties hailing cabs to get to the venue. Getting back by taxi isn’t quite as easy. There is a rank but there were only intermittent arrivals of empty taxis. Also, before the police moved in and took control of the queue, there was a certain fractiousness as people jostled for position. It did require waiting and patience but, with queueing duties shared to save too much standing, we were back at our central hotel about an hour after play ended. Leaving just before the last match ended to join the queue saved time but…
Getting Around
As a capital city Madrid has an extensive public transport network, plentiful taxis that can be hailed on the street (at least we had little trouble) and plenty of scope for cyclists and pedestrians. Like in most large, modern cities using a private or rental car to get around is for those who have special needs or for masochists. Naturally Uber and their ilk do their thing here. We used bus and taxi for the most part. Having grown wary of hidden issues for the mobility constrained on urban metro (subway) systems (long distances to platforms, flights of stairs and lack of seats on trains), I cannot make any comment on whether Madrid’s system suffers from these concerns because we did not use it. Their website does have clear information about which Metro stations have step-free access, which includes most of the key central stations (see the Accessible Stations section in English on this page – https://www.metromadrid.es/en/accessibility). We used a Madrid Travel Pass which seems to be the easiest way to manage your use of public transport. The official Madrid tourist information site bucks the Spanish tendency to online terseness and, to me, is informative as well as being in several languages. The page covering the Madrid Travel Pass covers the information you need to buy and use the card – https://www.esmadrid.com/en/madrid-tourist-travel-pass. We were distracted by the Madrid City Card (top right of the same webpage) as it seemed to offer benefits on top of the travel on public transport for the same price. If we understood the person manning the official Tourist Information kiosk at Callao correctly either the card did not exist or was, in effect, no different from the Travel Pass. Anyway, armed with our Pass bought at the nearby Callao Metro ticket office, we happily used it for our journeying around the city.
Mobility Access
The Madrid bus fleet is modern, with pretty good access from pavement (sidewalk) to bus. The land in central Madrid swoops up and down and some slopes can seem quite steep in places but, if you avoid the occasional brick-cobble roads, surfaces are smooth and well-paved. The broad boulevards that constitute the city streets around Museum Mile and the green expanse of El Retiro park are more-or-less flat and their tree-lined paths have resting places aplenty.
Hotel
Hotel Indigo
https://www.indigomadrid.com/en/#
We chose this hotel because of its central location, its proximity to the step-free accessible Callao Metro stop and because we had stayed in another manifestation of the Indigo brand and liked it (in Bath, England). Also, for central Madrid, the pricing was competitive. Our concerns when seeking out city centre hotels are, usually, to avoid the full-service, top-end places because the hotel only replicates facilities found with more variety elsewhere in a city. We rarely spend much time in the hotel other than to sleep and, for convenience, have breakfast. So for a stay of a week we like a decent sized room, a bathroom with a tub and, if possible, a pool and a gym room. The Indigo brand is part of the gargantuan IHG Hotel Group so that means signing up to their loyalty programme ensures an immediately available price discount. You just have to cope with the inevitable slew of consequential e-mail junk from them.
The hotel worked for us on all these levels and added in a rather splendid roof terrace for good measure. The website makes the rooftop pool look very tempting. Not in late April and early May with temperatures out of the sun distinctly chilly in the breezes sweeping around and, in any event, not if you want to swim laps – this is a trophy pool. The breakfast was adequate with some unexciting cooked dishes that we eschewed after the first morning. The dining offer, which we used a couple of times was equally run-of-the-mill, solid if unexciting. The service was fine, of the standard you expect from a not quite top-quality place (4 stars).
Mobility Access
It is a modern building of ten storeys that does not have a large footprint. This means both full accessibility with a lift (elevator) and no long corridors to walk down. Taxis pass the road outside fairly frequently. The wide main boulevard of Gran Vía is only a few steps away where nearby bus stops are served by around half-a-dozen bus routes. Callao’s fully accessible Metro stop is 150 metres up the slope of Gran Vía and the Santo Domingo Metro stop, which is not fully accessible, about the same distance in the other direction down Gran Vía.
Food and Drink
Evenings at the tennis restricted our scope for eating out in the city. Circumstances dictated that, even then, it was simpler to eat at the hotel or make use of the nearby Carrefour Market for snacks, water, fruit etc. This meant just one night out.
La Mi Venta
Unearthed after some online research, this seemed to satisfy our need for a place to try tapas that was more restaurant than bar and it nicely met our expectations. Yes, it is a little touristy but there was a preponderance of locals when we were there. A wide range of Spanish food (no paellas), with sharing plates a substantial part of the offer, make for a quality somewhat above the run-of-the-mill offer elsewhere. The vegetarian offer is limited but is there. The part of the basement cellar we were in was a high-ceilinged space that felt elegant without being intimidating. The staff were friendly, helpful and fun. Online booking is a must (you make a choice about whether to book an inside or outside table).
Mobility Access
There are two levels to the restaurant dining: a ground floor (with some outdoor tables) and a brick-walled cellar down a flight of steps. If the steps could be an issue, ask for a table upstairs. It is not within easy stepping distance of public transport for the mobility constrained. Also taxis cannot seem to get close to the restaurant very easily. Our arrival taxi dropped us about 100 metres up the hill from the entrance. Our departing taxi, called by the restaurant staff, seemed to solve the problem by reversing down the same slope to the entrance.
