Peñalara National Park.J.R. Patterson
Seclusion was the plan when we travelled to El Escorial, Spain, with a mission to hike the Sierra de Guadarrama.
It was from Ernest Hemingway’s novel For Whom the Bell Tolls that I learned about this area of the country. I was captivated by his story of the Spanish Civil War, of a band of guerillas hiding in the mountains and the American Robert Jordan who joins them to plot the destruction of a strategic bridge.
It was wild, ferocious country when Hemingway knew it, and though what remains is not wilderness exactly, neither is it tame.
My partner and I met with Azner Fernández, a local fixer, to talk about the route we would follow over a week of hiking. He had for us a dossier of maps, marked out with suggested routes from difficult to leisurely: From El Escorial to Cercedilla over the León pass, up to the Cotos pass, and down to La Granja, ending in Segovia.
Good roads and classy restaurants have made the sierra accessible for those who seek an easy escape from the oven that Madrid, only 50 kilometres away, becomes in the summer months. However, one can still walk for hours without seeing another human being.
The town of El Escorial, known for its 16th-century monastery, is one of many settings in For Whom the Bell Tolls, and is also a stop on this literary walking tour of Sierra de Guadarrama, the mountains between Madrid and Segovia.THE NATURAL ADVENTURE/Supplied
The month was April, with all the variable weather that came along with it. “It might be a little cold on the mountains,” Fernández said. “And it might rain. It might be hot, too. Are you ready for all that?” We were – packed light but smart, able to move quickly. We weren’t camping, but staying in nice hotels with breakfasts and showers; there was no need for any serious gear. If needed, we could hunker down, and wait out the weather. As proof, that night when a light rain began to fall, we decamped to our hotel and finished the evening drinking red wine and reading Alice Munro stories out loud. That was the Spanish way, I figured: a laissez-faire attitude that worried less about extending life (a fool’s errand) than about making it better.
The next day, to break our feet in, we did a circuit of the Machotas hills through a forest of oak and pine. As we climbed higher, we had our first look over the land, which was mixed country with no easy harmony. Everywhere I looked one scene encroached on another, the green fields matted with heavy scrub, outcrops of granite and small lakes, and orange boxes of villages. To the east, the four great skyscrapers of Madrid rose like stalagmites. We spent the next two days looking over that same land, climbing to the peak of Mount Abantos, and passing the monumental crucifix of the Valley of the Fallen – a cenotaph of the civil war.
Spain presents a difficult schedule for hikers who want early mornings and early nights. But one can’t fight the siesta, or rush the late-night suppers; one can only accept that hotel breakfasts are leisurely affairs, and that dining before 9 p.m. is taken as a sign of madness. What seems like lassitude or even stubbornness is really the capacity to endure; not through the day but over time. I admired the Spanish unwillingness to be convenient, their disinclination to change. It had a vigour that makes the world of 24-hour on-demand convenience look mollycoddled and foolish.
Yet sometimes we were too famished to wait, and several nights we had a restaurant to ourselves, eating fried squids and roasted suckling pig in a room of empty tables, cheering ourselves with mock exclusivity. We were our own good company, an enclave of two with no other allegiance. “One of life’s pleasures is wiping up sauce with bread,” my partner said, which did more for me than a thousand other conversations have.
Writer James Patterson on the trail of Ernest Hemingway, among the scotch broom of Spain's Guadarrama MountainsSara Soares/Supplied
The hills around Cercedilla gave us a tough day of fighting a stiff breeze and scrabbling over rocks scabbed with moss. Near the summit, we reached the open space of the majalasna pasture, a flat green field penned in by shoals of granite. There was a raw wind, and a damp that seemed to rise from the ground. We ate our picnic in the lee of a boulder, lying on a bed of pine needles. I could feel my heart beat, and looked up into the pine branches, which divided and tapered in repeating florets like the bronchiole of my own lungs, and which moved with the breeze as though the mountain had adjusted itself to pair with my breath.
At the end of the day, we stopped into the Bar Cirilo for a drink, where we found Fernández waiting for us and munching on a sandwich. He’d gone ahead of us to the Cotos pass, to check the snow forecast. It was cold, and there was still snow on the mountaintop, and the wind had been blowing there, too. He had the same flushed cheeks and fingers as us.
“It was very silly today,” he said.
“You mean chilly.”
“Yes – chilly and silly. Tomorrow will be better.”
It was – clear and crisp at Cotos, with flecks of snow on the mountain. Everything else was tan, lilac and grey. The trees were budding out, and the leaves were unfurling, the tender green breaking from their tight, fuzzy pupae. From the pass, we took the leisurely option, downhill into the Valsaín Valley to the banks of the Eresma River. There had been little rain, and the river was narrow, with deep holes and rapids, and blissful pools where trout had collected. We lunched in the gorge of the river, in the shadow of the Puente de la Cantina, a squat stone bridge that was the inspiration for the one Robert Jordan sought to demolish.
We paused outside the small pueblo of Valsaín, to sit in the shade of a thick oak tree in a pasture. The ochre buildings of Valsaín were crumbling. Palomino, sorrel, white and dun horses moved over the Castilian plain.
Alcazar of Segovia.The Natural Adventure/Supplied
We were not yet done. Beyond Valsaín, there would be time in La Granja, and walks through its sprawling gardens and marble statues. And there would be Segovia, its aqueduct a thing of skeletal beauty. There would be wine, and stacked plates of tapas, and morning mass in the peach-coloured cathedral. And laughter, and love. But I didn’t think of that, of the end of this journey. “I hate to leave a thing that is so good,” Robert Jordan says at the end of For Whom the Bell Tolls. So did I. I felt the warmth of the body pressed against me, the cool air on my face, the sound of the river tumbling over the weir. “And you had a lot of luck, he told himself, to have had such a good life.”
If you go: Walking Hemingway’s Sierra de Guadarrama starts at $1,115. For more information, visit www.thenaturaladventure.com.
The writer travelled as a guest of the Natural Adventure, which did not review or approve this article.