The Manzanares River

The other day I was talking to Ana, my sister, on the phone and I mentioned we had gone to see the river here in Madrid and her reply was "Madrid has a river!?" -haha. Indeed, it kind of came as a surprise to me too, because unlike other major cities whose central point is a river (the Hudson River, Charles River, Le Seine, TheTiber River), Madrid's River only covers one quadrant of the city (running from the West to the South of Madrid). It's called the Manzanares River (sounds like Manzana, Apples, but I'm not sure why it has that name) and it's a pretty narrow, unassuming river as far as rivers go. Nevertheless, some locals had told us it was worth checking out and so we made plans.

Valentina and Miguel mentioned that they knew of a chicken joint near the river where we could have lunch that day. As we walked down the street looking for the restaurant, I was imagining some small, hole-in-the-wall place, when we suddenly came upon this big rustic beautiful building called "Casa Mingo". It was awesome, really old and had the best chicken in town!

After a delicious chicken meal with homemade Cider we were ready to hit the river. Before we got there though, we went to visit this little church where the famous painter Goya is buried. To be exact, there are two identical churches: one being the original, which houses frescos painted by Goya, and the other a replica, becuase the first one was in delicate shape. Goya is buried in the replica, which is somewhat ironic being that he's buried in a church that has an imitation of his own artwork.

The plan was to rent bicycles, but we weren't really sure where to rent them. So, we just began to walk down the river. After the first 10 minutes we came upon this really cool "pine" park - very new and funky where the kids could play. In the picture below, Francisco is riding the wooden warthog like a Harley Davidson!

 

We kept walking and about a half kilometer up the path there was another park, even neater than the first. They had what may be described as an up-side down see-saw, where you sit on hanging sticks (below). Even the adults had a blast on that one!



Park number three along the path was pretty sophisticated. It had this fortress (below) that was rather tricky to climb up (knotted rope) so we ended up hauling all the kids up the long slide, and then enjoying the ride down. No matter what your age, there's always a kid inside ready to enjoy a good slide, right Fede?



I lost count of how many parks are along this 7km stretch of river, but it's more than seven. This was an ideal plan with the kids. The backdrop to the Manzanares River is the Royal Palace and the Cathedral of Almudena. Another Basilica (San Francisco el Grande) can also be seen. We were all impressed at how well designed portion of the river walk is, it is very exercise/kid/family friendly.

The Cathedral of Almudena

 As you can see, we did finally find the bike place and rented two of these quad-cycles: the two people in the back pedal, while the kids sit in the front. One adult steers and there's a brake in the middle. The pedaling is slow-going but super fun!

 

Antonio and Tomas were in one "car" while Eva, Alejandra and Francisco were in the other "car" and we took turns racing past the other car. The kids were in hog heaven :). Below we took a little break to enjoy these long swings that we came upon.

The Toledo Bridge can be seen above. This is as far as we got along the path before we had to turn around because we had to return the bikes to the rental place. Next time though, we are going to set aside a whole morning to spend at the river so that we can go the full 7 kms! That's it for now!