Nothewest of Madrid, in the foothills of the Sierra de Guadarrama is one of Spain's best-jnow and mos visited sihts - Felipe II's vast monastery-palace of El Escorial. Travel writers tend to go into frenzies about the symbolism of the building - "a stone image of the mind of its founder" was how the nineteenth-century writer Augustus Hare described it - and it is indeed a key historic sight. The town around the monastery, San Lorenzo del Escorial, is an easy day-trip from Madrid, or if you plan to travel on, rail and road routes continue to Avila and Segovia. The heart of the Sierra de Guadarrama, too, lies just to the north, offering Madrid's easiest mountain escape.

Tours from Madrid to El escorial often take in El Valle de los Caídos (The valley of the Fallen), 9 km north. This is an equally megomaniac yet a far more chilling monument; an underground basilica hewn under Franco's orders, allegedly as a monument to the Civil War dead of both sides, though in reality as a memorial to the Generalisimo and his regime.

El Escorial

The monastery of El escorial was the largest Spanish building of the Renaissance: rectangular, overbearing and severe, from the outside it was originalle the creation of Juan Bautista de Toledo, Though his one-time assistant, Juan de Herrera, took over and is normally given credit for the design. Felipe II planned the complex as both monastery and mausoleum, where he would life the life of a monk and "rule the world with two inches of paper". Later monarchs had less ascetic lifestyles, enlarging and richly decorating the palace quarters, but Felipe's simple rooms, with the chair that supported his gouty leg and the deathbed from which he could look across into the church where Mass was constantly celebrated, remain the most fascinating.

There's more to see than you can fit into a single day without total exhaustion, and you're liable to end up agreeing with Augustus Hare that while the Escorial is so profuondly curious that it must of necessity be visited, it is so utterly dreary and so hopelessly fatiguing a sight that it requires the utmost patience to endure it.