¡Teleférica!

Apologies for the exclamation marks in the post's title: that's just the sort of emotion these triumphs of technology rouse in me. Last Saturday we went to the Casa de Campo by cable car, starting close-ish to our house and heading out in the first group at midday. Obviously, it's not the only way to travel; it was very enjoyable. We crossed the Rio Manzanares, about which my boss said in one of our fraught and generally surreal meetings that once they get it sorted out and run it in canals across Madrid, it'll 'knock your Seine and your Thames through the bathroom window'. I think he thinks that's an idiom.


Madrid herself was sunk in smog: apparently, until the rains came a day or so after this trip, the air quality was at its lowest level of the whole year. That's the Catedral de la Almudena in rather hazy silhouette.

The most exciting thing to see from the cable car is, of course, other cable cars.



We had bought return tickets, but decided to walk back to the centre instead. On the way back we saw the Madrid Parque de Atracciones which is terrifying even shrouded in smog and through a number of digital filters.


There was a loud and belligerent blue-tit.

A publicly-funded duck house on a public lake (MPs in Spain: more honest, or more subtle than their UK counterparts?).

And, crossing it on foot, the Rio Manzanares has something about it that suggests my boss might not be entirely insane.