Logbook · 3 places

What to see and do in Valdemaqueda

What to see and do in Valdemaqueda (Sierra Oeste, Madrid): 3 places across monuments, nature, activities and curiosities, with a photo and a Google Maps location.

1 Villages · 1 Monuments · 1 Nature

Towns near Valdemaqueda

Spain › Community of Madrid › Sierra Oeste › Valdemaqueda

What to see and do in Valdemaqueda

Valdemaqueda
Village
Valdemaqueda is a hamlet of the Community of Madrid, in the Sierra Oeste comarca, on the border with Castile and León, situated at 872 metres above sea level among pine woods and rocky outcrops of the Cofio valley, a tributary of the Alberche. Its name may date back to Andalusi times: the historian Al-Himyari located the “bridge of Māqida”, the boundary of Islamic territory, at a distance from Madrid that coincides with that of Valdemaqueda, although the first certain written reference does not appear until 1340. In the 18th century, with barely a hundred inhabitants, it broke away from Las Navas del Marqués, in Ávila, because of the high taxes it had to pay. It now has about 870 inhabitants. Its monument is the Puente Mocha, a late medieval four-arch structure, and timber from its mountains went into the works of El Escorial.
Mocha Bridge over the Cofio River
Monument
A bridge of four semicircular arches and some forty metres in length thrown across the Cofio four kilometres from the village; despite being popularly called Roman, its fabric belongs to the late Middle Ages or the early Renaissance.
Valley of the Cofio River in Valdemaqueda
Nature
The Cofio, the main tributary of the Alberche, crosses the district between pine and oak woods included in the Alberche and Cofio River Basins Special Area of Conservation, the largest protected area in Madrid at 83,089 hectares.