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Colmenar Viejo

Colmenar Viejo is located in a privileged enclave on the southern slopes of the Guadarrama mountain range. Its municipal area is the largest in the province of Madrid, excluding the capital.

The name of the town of Colmenar Viejo has been linked since ancient times to the place where the houses of Diego González Primo were located, where there was, as they say, a beekeeping area, and near this lived an old man known by the nickname 'el viejo' (the old man). Next to this place, the road from Alcalá de Henares to Segovia passed, crossing the Manzanares River by the Grajal and Nuevo bridges. Travelers used to spend the night at the old man's house, who expanded his accommodations, and some of the guests settled permanently, giving rise to a village called 'Colmenar del Viejo', which is now Colmenar Viejo.

Various archaeological campaigns carried out in recent years in the lands of Colmenar Viejo and its region have brought to light a series of remains that allow us to assert with a high degree of reliability the existence, from the 6th century and until an undetermined period (10th century?), of more or less stable and lasting human settlements, prior to the Christian reconquest and repopulation.

When at the end of the 11th century, Alfonso VI conquered the current province of Madrid, there were hardly any settlements north of the city of Madrid, to whom the monarch granted a jurisdiction or territory dependent on him with vaguely defined boundaries: the mountains and sierras between this city and the city of Segovia, from the Berrueco pass to the Lozoya pass. This generic delimitation and the Segovian need for more pastures for their extensive flocks of sheep will provoke a centuries-old conflict between both councils, which will lead to armed conflict around 1236, when the city of Segovia founds a series of new settlements, initially Manzanares and Colmenar, with the clear purpose of securing its rights over the area.

Finally, and in order to avoid greater evils, Alfonso X will withdraw the disputed territory from both councils, which will henceforth be known as 'El Real de Manzanares', and will directly depend on the Crown until the monarch determines to whom it belongs. At the head of the territory, Alfonso X places a representative of the Crown. Thus, over almost a century, between 1290 and 1383, the Real de Manzanares, and consequently Colmenar Viejo, will depend on a series of individuals linked to the Crown.

On November 1, 1383, Alfonso XI grants a privilege in La Puebla de Montalbán by which he grants the Real de Manzanares to his Chief Steward D. Pedro González de Mendoza. This will be the definitive allocation, completed with the subsequent grant, in 1445, to one of his successors, D. Íñigo López de Mendoza, of the title of Count of the Real de Manzanares, in the hands of whose descendants the jurisdiction of the territory will remain until the dissolution of the Lordships in the 19th century.

The so-called State of the Real and County of Manzanares, integrated several decades later into the broader one of the Ducal House of the Infantado, was composed of a town, Manzanares, and 22 villages and places. The evolution followed by the different populations of the Real between the 13th and 16th centuries will be very different. While the town, Manzanares, grows very slowly, some of the still villages, such as Guadarrama, Porquerizas (now Miraflores), and especially Colmenar Viejo, will experience a significant demographic growth. Of all of them, Colmenar Viejo is the one that concentrates the most population of the entire Real and County, in such a way that it will be the first of all to achieve, on November 22, 1504, in the final days of the life of Queen Isabella, the jurisdictional segregation from Manzanares; being the town that will achieve a larger municipal area, and shortly after becoming the economic and administrative center of the Lordship and residence of the Governor and Mayor of the County.

Demographically, the 16th century represents the zenith of a constant growth that starts from the second half of the 15th century and will reach its highest levels in the 1590s with a population of around 1,500 inhabitants.

In 1752, during the reign of Fernando VI, the 'Catrasto de Ensenada' was carried out, in which the population of Colmenar was recorded as 3,792 individuals, representing 0.05% of the total Castilian population. It was therefore a town with a significant number of inhabitants. In 18th century Spain, the weight of agriculture limited the possibilities of industrialization, as traditional forms of ownership and technical stagnation persisted. In that year, more than a third of the active population of Colmenar was dedicated to agriculture, a number that increases considerably if we take into account that many practitioners of other trades were also farmers. There is a strong presence of craftsmanship, with 27.5% of the active population, as well as 1,820 inventoried beehives. Production tends to be organized in a self-sufficiency regime.

The 19th century represents a great advance for Colmenar Viejo in terms of communications and transportation. Already in 1864, the newly created Ministry of Public Works, in the 'Memories of the Progress of Public Works in Spain', includes the budget for the construction of the road from Manzanares to Fuencarral through Colmenar Viejo. In 1869, the daily mail service between Madrid and Colmenar was put out to public tender, and in July 1888, the telegraph line was achieved. In 1895, a project for a steam tramway from Madrid to Colmenar Viejo, passing through Chamartín, was established, but it would not come to fruition until Arturo Soria took it on in 1905, managing to run the first convoy on May 30, 1911.

At the end of the 19th century, Colmenar Viejo presents an economic structure where the primary sector, as in the rest of Spain, is predominant, although a small industrial development begins to be glimpsed, with small industries such as wool washing, tanning factories, and others derived mainly from the livestock subsector. All this without forgetting the extraction of stone in the numerous existing quarries, mainly after the crisis that arose during the Second Republic.

Shortly before the end of the 19th century, a work of great importance was carried out, not only due to the spatial change in the celebration of certain traditional festivities, but also due to the scale of the undertaking, as it is the construction of a bullring whose inauguration took place during the patron saint festivities of 1891. The bullring constituted one of the first symbols of modernity for this town.

This development, at the beginning of the 20th century, will be determined by the provision of water and electricity, through successive contracts with the Hidráulica Santillana company. However, the town's sources continued to serve their function of supply. At the same time, the regulation of the Manzanares River would ruin the mills and fulling mills that were so important for the economy of Colmenar since the late Middle Ages.

As a prominent point of interest, we find the Church, whose construction seems to have begun, according to its architectural characteristics, at the end of the 15th century under the patronage of the Mendoza family, lords of Colmenar Viejo and the Real de Manzanares. Due to its large dimensions, it was not completed until the end of the 16th century. Its imposing volume, together with its graceful tower, makes the building dominate the town. Stonemasons trained in the construction of the Manzanares castle, built a few years earlier under the direction of the master Juan Guas, one of the best representatives of the so-called Gothic of the Catholic Monarchs, participated in its construction.

The most important artistic ensemble is the main altarpiece, which was made between 1560 and 1584. It is framed within the Plateresque Renaissance, with Alonso Sánchez Coello and Francisco Giralte being some of the most prominent painters and sculptors. The figure of the Virgin Mary stands out, represented in the center by her Assumption into heaven. Also noteworthy is its tower, at the foot of the church, with a height of about 50 meters. It has several bodies of ashlar stone, topped with an octagonal spire of limestone with pinnacles and gargoyles at its corners.
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Scale = 1 : 867K
20 km
10 mi
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