Colmenar Viejo


Colmenar Viejo is a town and municipality of about 48,614 inhabitants, located in the Community of Madrid, Spain, 30 kilometers north of Madrid on the M-607 motorway. It belongs to the comarca of Cuenca Alta del Manzanares.

Main sights

In the town, there are many archeological sites, most of them come from Hispanic-Visigothic times, with household areas and burials.
The most important tourist attractions places in Colmenar Viejo are:
Colmenar Viejo's municipality has a size of 182.6 square kilometres, the third largest in the province of Madrid, after Madrid and Aranjuez.
Traditional granite mining has been changing Colmenar Viejo's landscape. As a result of livestock farming, mainly cow and horse cattle, grassland has been taking a main role.
A large part of land under Colmenar Viejo's jurisdiction is inside of the Parque regional de la Cuenca Alta del Manzanares, causing that land to be under a high protection environmental level.
The Navalvillar Grassland is protected by the municipality and, albeit it does not belong to the Park, it is quite rich in flora and fauna.

Climate

Colmenar Viejo has a hot-summer Mediterranean climate with cold winters.

Demography

Cinematography

Estudios Tablada in Madrid used the Dehesa de Navalvillar as a filming location for films such as El Cid, Spartacus, Alexander the Great, For A Few Dollars More, La última aventura, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly and Conan the Barbarian.
The television series Locked Up also commissioned a studio in Colmenar Viejo for most of its filming. Lately, the Netflix series Money Heist and Sky Rojo took several scenes filmed there.

Transport

Bus

Urban lines

Colmenar Viejo has a train station in the outskirts of the town, which is the terminal of line C-4 of Cercanías Madrid. From the station, you can go to Tres Cantos in about 8 minutes, to Cantoblanco University in about 15 and to Madrid in about 23. Since 2011, they used to pass trains to Burgos in Colmenar, but due to a detachment in the Somosierra tunnel, the trains to Burgos no longer pass through here.

Festivities

  • Fiesta de la Vaquilla, February 2
  • Fiesta de la Maya, May 2
  • Festivities in honour of the Virgen of Remedios, last weekend of August
  • Day of Colmenar Viejo, commemorating the village's endorsement by Ferdinand II of Aragon, November 22

    Bullfighting

The Colmenar Viejo bullring was inaugurated in 1891, and has since come to be one of Spain's foremost, second only to Las Ventas in downtown Madrid. It is sometimes called La Corredera. After a renovation, it was reinaugurated in 1990. It gained notoriety in 1985 when a bull named Burlero gored the popular bullfighter José Cubero Sánchez to death.

Notable people