Logbook · 7 places

What to see and do in Robledo de Chavela

What to see and do in Robledo de Chavela (Sierra Oeste, Madrid): 7 places across monuments, nature, activities and curiosities, with a photo and a Google Maps location.

1 Villages · 2 Monuments · 2 Nature · 1 Activities · 1 Historical milestones

How far each place is from the centre of Robledo de Chavela

Cruz Verde mountain pass 7.6 km
Madrid Deep Space Communications Complex 7.7 km

Towns near Robledo de Chavela

Spain › Community of Madrid › Sierra Oeste › Robledo de Chavela

What to see and do in Robledo de Chavela

Robledo de Chavela
Village
Robledo de Chavela is a village in the Community of Madrid, in the Sierra Oeste, between the sierra de Guadarrama and that of Gredos, with about 4,800 inhabitants. Its name combines the Latin roburetum, “robledo”, oak grove, from the oaks that once populated its surroundings, today partly replaced by pines, with “Chavela”, of disputed origin: for some it recalls Isabella the Catholic, whose chamber painter, the Maestro de Robledo de Chavela, painted the altarpiece of the church of the Asunción; for others it refers to the eight soldiers who guarded, in the Middle Ages, the fortress where that same church now stands. Its granite quarries supplied the works of El Escorial. The church preserves a 15th-century altarpiece, and on its territory operates NASA's deep space communications complex.
Church of la Asunción de Nuestra Señora de Robledo
Monument
Church of the 14th and 15th centuries whose bell tower is topped by eight pinnacles oriented to the cardinal points; it houses a high altarpiece by the so-called Master of Robledo de Chavela, a painter linked to the court of Isabella the Catholic.
Madrid Deep Space Communications Complex
Activity
The Madrid Deep Space Communications Complex is a station of the Deep Space Network born of a Spanish-American agreement of 1964 and operational since July 1965, run by the National Institute for Aerospace Technology as part of the bilateral cooperation with NASA. It combines the 70-metre DSS-63 antenna with several 34-metre ones, and tracks probes such as the Voyagers or Cassini. It is one of the network's three sites, together with the complexes at Goldstone, California, and Canberra, Australia, and it also supports radio astronomy and very-long-baseline interferometry, including its participation in the European VLBI Network.
Holm oak groves of the Alberche and Cofio rivers
Nature
A Special Protection Area for Birds of more than 83,000 hectares covering much of the Sierra Oeste; it is home to a breeding colony of black vultures and to populations of Spanish imperial eagle and black stork.
Cruz Verde mountain pass
Nature
A pass in the sierra de Guadarrama at 1,256 metres above sea level that separates the municipality of Robledo from that of San Lorenzo de El Escorial, flanked to the east by Las Machotas and to the west by the cerro de San Benito, 1,626 metres high. It is crossed by the M-505 road, towards Santa María de la Alameda and Ávila, and the M-512, which links up with the so-called carretera de los pantanos towards the Alberche valley. Part of the stone used to build the Monasterio de El Escorial came from its old quarries, and a few metres from the pass there were magnesite mines worked from 1940, whose outdoor area was converted in 2009 into an open-air auditorium, the setting each summer for the La Antigua Mina festival. Tradition places here the legend of the Dama de la Cruz Verde, a ghostly hitchhiker.
Main altarpiece of the church of the Asunción of Robledo
Monument
A Hispano-Flemish altarpiece of gilded and polychrome wood made up of thirty-two oil panels depicting the life of the Virgin and of Jesus, attributed to the so-called Master of Robledo de Chavela and dated to the early 16th century.
The arrival of the Deep Space Network
Historical milestone
Spain and the United States signed in January 1964 the agreement to build here a spacecraft tracking station. Its first antenna, of twenty-six metres, entered service in July 1965, in time to receive the Mars images from Mariner 4.