The best traffic-free bike rides around Driebes

Very compact cycle track

The white and blue signs of the Camino de Uclés are paired with the yellow arrows of the Camino de Santiago de Uclés, one of the variants of the Jacobean routes that leaves for Santiago de Compostela from the Monastery of Uclés, one of the heads (Caput Ordinis) of the Order of Santiago from the 13th century.

The Monastery welcomes you at the top of the village with a stunning view from the road leading to Uclés. After a long bike ride, it is a good reward.

Built by the Order of Santiago, construction began in 1529 while Charles I reigned and was completed in 1735 under the reign of Philip V. Monumental construction that leaves no one indifferent, and that during the civil war was first a hospital for one side and later a prison for the other. You can visit it by paying an entrance fee and it is no longer used as a guest house because only one monk lives there, who possibly does not reside there at the time I write this chronicle.

This spectacular building built by the Order of Santiago is the end of the route or pilgrimage path that starts from the Church of Santiago in Madrid, and is usually done by numerous pilgrims both on foot and by bike.

The fountain, like all the architecture of the place, is a beautiful carved stone with its metal decorations that inexorably suffer the passage of time.

In the agricultural wastelands of Valdaracete, a striking journey towards the Tagus River begins through a curious landscape of clay hills and whitish marls in a desert and steppe environment, especially in the hard slides of Cerro de la Muela, a desert in Las Vegas, where the gypsum gullies that can become hell for pedaling on rainy days. The sensation of navigating a bicycle through distant and exotic latitudes ends when the road leaves the valley of the Valle stream, passes through the A-3 tunnel and ends in Fuentidueña de Tajo.

The Cañada Real Soriana Oriental runs through the north of the municipality of Brea de Tajo through a landscape of crops and pastures of oaks with abundant stands of kermes oaks and gall oaks, making up a territory of great environmental quality of ocher and red hills populated by some centenary specimens. The route of the livestock route is integrated into several local hiking routes, it has rest areas, a point of interest with interpretive panels and several cabins from the glorious era of the Concejo de la Mesta, used for centuries by shepherds on long migratory journeys. . On the side of the road appears the Cabaña del Quiñonero, which has been rehabilitated and shows the main elements of pastoral constructions, with one floor covered by a conical vault and another rectangular room that was used to store livestock. The path crosses the Orusco de Tajuña highway and enters a terrain of slides populated by dense forests of oaks and gall oaks of monumental size on Mount El Robledal. In one of the valleys appears the Pozo de la Yesera, an old traditional well used by herds as a resting place. And shortly after, at the end of the next slope, are the old Corrales del Calero, like sentinels at the top of a solitary hill adorned with an ancient almond tree. By bicycle the path passes quickly, crosses the Cordel de las Merinas and immediately crosses the Carabaña road and the 40 Days Train, in this section converted into a Greenway. At the intersection there is a small rest area and an information panel. The 40 Day Train was a military railway line built in record time during the Civil War between Tarancón and Torrejón de Ardoz to supply the Republican troops fighting in the trenches of the capital. In reality, it took one hundred days to launch the line and it was known as Vía Negrín after the head of the government who ordered the construction in 1937.