When you go to Segovia, do it as a day trip from Madrid. Take the 8:30am high-speed AVE train from Estación de Chamartín, and you’ll get to this fabled town just as it’s slowly waking up. The tour buses will not have arrived yet. The cobbled streets within the walled city will be mercifully empty and quiet, filled with the smells of coffee and freshly baked bread. The train will leave you at the snazzy new AVE station just outside the city from which a cheap and frequent eight-minute bus ride will take you within two blocks of where you want to be. Then you can stroll leisurely past all of the beauty at your own pace, winding up at the Alcázar at the peak of the town. That’s what Columbus did on the day he went to petition Ferdinand and Isabella when they ruled the Spanish Empire from here way back when. And look at this magical misty view you’ll not find if you arrive later in the day. No wonder Uncle Walt modeled his Disneyland castle after the Alcázar. After our morning in Segovia, we had a picnic lunch in one of its parks, then took a bus to Ávila to pay our respects to Saint Teresa (another one of those saints whose body parts are distributed reverently among several different sacred locations) before heading back to Madrid via a lazy, long, nap-enducing train journey through the Castilian countryside.
Nice to be reminded that places like this still exist.
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