The best walks and hikes around La Hiruela

Recreational area on the banks of the Jarama River and the old Hiruela Mill.

Charcoal is no longer used, but this facility is a typical place where this product was generated.

Countless ancient Pyrenean oak trees make this forest an enchanting place. You can take hundreds of photos.

This point on the ridge is a privileged spot for taking in the views. The green vegetation contrasts with the sharp slate slabs.

The landscape of the El Cardoso Pass is very typical of the Central Mountain System. Its pass separates the oak forest that thrives on one side and the pine trees that spread across the other. It also has extensive alpine meadows from which the rest of the mountain range can be seen.

This port serves as an ideal baptism for those who begin to climb ports: easy, without traffic and with charm. But it also serves as an aperitif before other ports such as La Hiruela or La Puebla, with which you can easily connect to do much harder routes. Although it only reaches 1,358 meters, it is a natural border of very different landscapes, with oak trees on one side and pine trees on the other, and a fantastic gateway to the cycling paradise that exists on the Madrid-Guadalajara border. It serves as an indication that it is the necessary previous step to reach the famous Hayedo de Montejo. El Puerto del Cardoso via El Cardoso de la Sierra is a climb in the Castilla-La Mancha region. It has a length of 10.2 kilometers and a climb of 277 vertical meters with a slope of 2.7% on average, which implies a difficulty level of 134. The top of the climb is located at 1353 meters

On the way is the traditional apiary of the population surrounded by a stone wall to prevent the entry of animals. The use of clay, wood, quartzite, slate and other materials from the terrain produces a mimetic architecture, fully integrated into the environment to the point of going unnoticed because it is part of the rural landscape. The most characteristic auxiliary constructions of black architecture are the sheds, the farrowing pens and the fences, in most cases they serve to control the cattle and defend the mowing pastures, the apiaries and the fruit crops, but they also serve to delimit the traditional paths and the old roads that the inhabitants of the towns of the mountain valleys have used for centuries to communicate. The herrenes or fenced plots between the oak meadows are built using walls of rough slate blocks, alternating with large slate slabs or raft boats, finishing off the fence with other horizontal slabs or covering boats, giving the construction a primitive and megalithic appearance. . The hives are made of hollow oak trunks, covered with slate slabs and sealed with tin sheets and adobe. On the way to the town you can also see the reproduction of a traditional coal cellar, a reminder of the old lifestyles and trades of other times. On one side of the building there is an interpretive panel of the charcoal burner's trade.

La Hiruela is a mountain town that suffered a dramatic population abandonment in the first decades of the 20th century. The isolation and remoteness of the main communication routes, together with the scarcity of resources in a thankless mountain range, caused a constant emigration of the population towards the big cities to leave a territory where rural life was difficult. The region of the black towns of Madrid and Guadalajara was known as the “sierra pobre”, in comparison with the “sierra rica” of upper Lozoya and the upper basin of the Manzanares and Guadarrama rivers. The rise of active tourism and recreational activities in the environment have caused a resurgence of a new lifestyle dedicated to active leisure and rural tourism products. Crafts, gastronomy, ethnography, hiking, mountain biking, landscape interpretation or nature photography, among many other things, make up an interesting range of attractions that inevitably seduce travelers who visit La Hiruela and the rest of the towns and natural landscapes of Sierra del Rincón, declared a Biosphere Reserve in 2005 by UNESCO.