The Finnish birch, poplar and fir forest of Rascafría is the perfect place to escape to when the walks through the Casa de Campo or El Retiro start to fall short. Accustomed to the landscape of the most typical dehesas and pine forests of Madrid, going from the center to the Sierra Norte is to the eye like having traveled thousands of kilometers, when, in reality, it has only been two miles hours by bus from Plaza Castilla.
The landscape has the colors that the deciduous trees bring to each season. This beautiful process unites it in tonalities with the popular (and very protected) Montejo beech forest of the Rincón mountain range, but the advantage of the Finnish forest is that there are no restrictions on how far you can travel through it.
Another of the attractions of this hiking route is precisely that every three months it has a different charm: in autumn, the golden of the leaves about to fall; in winter it is usually snowy; in spring, the bath of green comes after the cold and in summer it is more refreshing than a fresh watermelon. It may not come as a surprise, but Rascafría is one of the coldest towns in the world of the Community of Madrid, at any time of the year.
How to get to the Finnish forest
The path is short, flat, perfect to go with children, from the monastery to the lake is about 400 m and then you can continue following the river to Rascafría. In total, round trip from the village is about 4 km. The small reservoir has a jetty and a cabin where the photos are repeated, it is on the left after crossing the Puente del Perdón. From here, following the straight road, you can take a longer hike, about 10 km, to the purgatory waterfall.
The route is traced by the ancient Carthusian monks who lived here from the late fourteenth century until 1954, and made the so-called Paper Road, because from these trees were made the dense leaves of the old books (according to some sources, the first copies of Don Quixotewere printed here).