Logbook · 4 places

What to see and do in Fresnedillas de la Oliva

What to see and do in Fresnedillas de la Oliva (Sierra Oeste, Madrid): 4 places across monuments, nature, activities and curiosities, with a photo and a Google Maps location.

1 Villages · 1 Monuments · 1 Curiosities · 1 Historical milestones

How far each place is from the centre of Fresnedillas de la Oliva

Apollo Station of Fresnedillas 3.7 km

Towns near Fresnedillas de la Oliva

What to see in Navalagamella 4.5 km · 3 places
What to see in Robledo de Chavela 6 km · 7 places
What to see in Zarzalejo 6.8 km · 4 places
What to see in Colmenar del Arroyo 7.9 km · 5 places
What to see in Valdemorillo 8.9 km · 5 places
What to see in Valdemaqueda 11 km · 3 places
What to see in El Escorial 11 km · 5 places
What to see in Quijorna 12 km · 2 places

Spain › Community of Madrid › Sierra Oeste › Fresnedillas de la Oliva

What to see and do in Fresnedillas de la Oliva

Fresnedillas de la Oliva
Village
Fresnedillas de la Oliva is a municipality of the Community of Madrid whose name recalls the nearby ash woods and the fruit of the olive tree. It borders Robledo de Chavela, Navalagamella and Colmenar del Arroyo, and its territory, a holm oak ecosystem with pastures, rockrose and broom, also preserves pine woods beside the Chorrera stream and the Navalquejigo dehesa. In the La Mata site, ceramic remains of a seasonal Bronze Age settlement were found in 1992, dating back about a thousand years before Christ. It has about 1,900 inhabitants. Its NASA tracking station, active between 1967 and 1985, received the signals from the Apollo 11 lunar module in 1969; it preserves the church of San Bartolomé, from the 16th century, and celebrates the Vaquilla on 20 January.
Lunar Museum of Fresnedillas
Monument
A centre inaugurated on 9 June 2010 in memory of the local tracking station and reopened on 20 July 2019, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Moon landing, with larger premises and the name Centre for Space and Science.
Apollo Station of Fresnedillas
Curiosity
Between 1967 and 1985 the village housed one of the three main stations of NASA's MSFN network, together with Goldstone and Honeysuckle Creek, spaced about 120 degrees of longitude apart to keep continuous contact with the Apollo spacecraft. The antennas were installed some 50 kilometres from Madrid under an agreement between the Spanish and United States governments, and began their tracking work on 4 July 1967. It had an X-Y-mounted Cassegrain parabolic antenna 26 metres in diameter; once the Apollo programme ended, a second Cassegrain antenna was added, also X-Y-mounted, 9 metres across, dedicated to tracking satellites in orbits close to Earth.
The first voice from the Moon arrived in Fresnedillas
Historical milestone
The tracking station that NASA installed in the municipality was the first point on Earth to receive in 1969 the voice of Neil Armstrong announcing the Apollo 11 moon landing: the signal arrived here four tenths of a second before it reached Houston.