So close, yet so far...

Though it may not feel like it this week, believe it or not it isn’t summer in Madrid. Down here in the city it’s sunny and warm and it seems like spring has come a bit earlier than expected. However, a glance north to the sierra shows that it is indeed still winter! I’ve always traveled to Chicago at Christmastime, so a winter without snow is very strange to me. A few weekends ago I decided to hop on the Madrid Cercanías train to see some of the white stuff in the mountains.

The C-8 train from Madrid leaves from Atocha or Nuevos Ministerios and makes it up to Cercedilla in just over an hour. I took this time as an opportunity to drool over Madrid’s skyline and desertlike surrounding areas while the folks around me rode along anxiously in their snow gear. Upon arrival in Cercedilla, I approached the ticket counter to ask about continuing train tickets to Navacerrada on the C-9 line to Cotos, a small mountain town on the border of the Comunidad de Madrid and Castilla-La Mancha. The Cotos station is currently closed due to some construction work, so Navacerrada was about as far as I could hope to get.

Ticket Counter Guy informed me and the 25 or so people in line behind me that tickets for the C-9 train could be purchased on the train that would be leaving in two hours. I took those two hours and walked up into Cercedilla to enjoy the sun and have a quick lunch. From town I enjoyed beautiful mountain views and quaint small-town charm, complete with ridiculously cheap cañas and abundant aperitivos. After two hours passed, I returned to the train station to find an enormous crowd of snow-seekers decked out in their finest cold-weather attire waiting to board the C-9 and purchase their tickets. A different train employee walked to the front of the crowd and announced that only those passengers holding return tickets for line C-9 would be allowed to board the train, and that there were no available tickets to be purchased. A few people boarded the C-9; the majority boarded the C-8 back to Madrid. The moral of this story: I should have bought my ticket in advance!

So, how do you do that? Well, the C-9 has different rules from the 4th of December to the 24th of April this year. This means it will be 100% mandatory that travelers purchase their return tickets in advance at Cercanías stations before leaving. The C-9 tickets are different from C-8 tickets, as they’re in a different transport zone. There are a few ways for you to purchase your ticket up to the snow:

• If you have an Abono Transporte, you can ask for an ampliación at ticket windows that will allow you to pay the difference between your Abono’s zone and zone C2.
• If you do not have an Abono Transporte, I recommend that you purchase an Abono Turístico, or a Tourist Pass. A return ticket from Madrid to zone C2 costs 12 euros, but a single day Tourist Pass in “Zone T” also costs 12 euros, and this will allow you to take as many forms of public transport as you like, all over Madrid, for one day.
• If you have an Abono Transporte for zone C2, you must still reserve a space at the ticket window. In the winter, this route is extremely popular but there are very few trains running on the weekend. Be sure to get your seat!!

Now that I know this information, I suppose I’ll have to try again very soon… if the recent weather patterns mean anything for the snow on the mountaintops, we don’t have much more time to see snow!