I have a love/hate relationship with La Pedriza. Or, maybe more of a cautious almost enjoyment/hate relationship. Let me explain:
La Pedriza is a fascinating feature of the Guadarrama mountain range outside the city of Madrid (but inside the Madrid region) in the town of Manzanares. It is primarily made up of giant granite cliffs and boulders that create an interesting labyrinthic lunar feel. It’s easily accessed from the city, so it can be quite busy. The area we went to this weekend is one of the less busy areas, but we still saw a number of people, which is to be expected on a sunny day.
La Pedriza is absolutely amazing to look at. The variation of the rock features is innumerable…as is the variation in trails – human, goat, and wild boar. Here in lies the issue. The main human-made trails are more or less easy to follow. They are generally blazed, but with a bizarrely whimsical strategy that is sometimes completely unhelpful. For example, they’ll lead you in one direction quite assuredly only to mark that you should not continue in that direction, which is when you discover that the trail is actually directly behind you where you just came from and you didn’t see it before because the blaze was on the wrong side of the rock. The goat trails generally get you somewhere you want to go, as long as you want to go to a rocky ridge or outcrop, which is usually the goal anyway. The wild boar, on the other hand, seem determined to use their plow-like tusks to erase all evidence of any footpath – goat or human.
Every time we go to La Pedriza, we follow some combination of human-made main trails, human-made side trails (unblazed and marked with cairns), and goat-made trails occasionally erased by the tireless efforts of the boar. We also always get a little lost. Not lost as in we have no idea where we are but lost as in “we know where we are (point A) and where we want to go (point B), but we have no idea how to connect these two points as the path we were following has turned into a swath of boar-churned earth.”
This weekend’s activity started out promising, as we followed a tranquil dirt road that followed a “Via Pecuaria” or “Cañada.” These are livestock trails usually bordered by stone walls. The wider ones sometimes have a dirt road (like this one), and they are all public.
I was overly optimistic as we walked casually past the farms, most with signs warning of the “Ganado Bravo” or bullfighting bulls and up into the mountains past an old gneiss quarry, where the dirt road turned into a pretty decent blazed trail.
In a heavily eroded area near a stream, we were suddenly trail-less and bushwhacking through some combination of the aforementioned trails. It turns out that the actual trail crossed the stream, but it didn’t on our map, so we didn’t either. This is the other problem with La Pedriza – it’s hard to trust the maps.
However, as we knew and could see point B (an open saddle strewn with exciting boulders), we continued on our sometimes-interrupted goat trail until we arrived, somewhat damp from the knee-high brush. (I said that the goats generally get you where you want to go.)
After lunch in the saddle, we continued up to the ridge and followed its rocky course past several interesting rock formations, including one called “la cara” (the face), until we started descending through the rocks to the Pyramids. The Pyramids are exactly that – three pyramids that stand much, much smaller than those of Egypt but slightly taller than an average-sized person. They are clearly man-made, but slightly more mysterious since I have no idea who made them.
Not long after the pyramids, we looped back to the dirt road to continue back to where we started at the bus stop near the camping area in the outskirts of Manzanares.
Overall, it was a good trip, but the bus back to the city was too crowded, and I didn’t feel comfortable as we still have high rates of Covid-19 here. The one in the morning was almost empty, and I feel kind of stupid for expecting that the afternoon one would be the same. Madrid is basically pretending the pandemic doesn’t exist and is operating public transportation at full capacity. However, just because I can do something, doesn’t necessarily mean I should do it. As such, I think I’ll only hike places that I can get to more safely or I’ll go on shorter loops so I can head home earlier.
