01 Under thirty minutes

The high-speed service between Madrid and Toledo opened on 15 November 2005, cutting the journey to just under thirty minutes. The earlier conventional service had run until 2 July 2003. That date explains how the city is visited today.

The rail link's effect is not new: as far back as the nineteenth century, tourism brought by the railway drove the growth of the city's hospitality trade. What changed in 2005 was not that people came, but that they stopped sleeping here.

02 What happens at half past six

The old town has a very marked daily rhythm, and it is not a local rhythm: it is set by the coaches and the trains. Between eleven and six the main streets are full; after that hour they empty in under an hour, and by nine they are deserted.

An old-town street at midday under a blue sky with cloud: in the lower half of the frame some twenty people walk or stand, a red car is parked and a chalkboard menu leans on the ground; above, tall walls of rubble stone and brick with iron balconies and, behind, a tower and a dome.
The same street at midday. The menu board, the groups and the parked car are the landscape of the visiting hours.Yair Haklai / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0·CC BY-SA 4.0

The city in the photographs and the city at ten at night are physically the same and bear no resemblance to each other.

The same cobbled street entirely empty at the end of the day, iron bollards spread across the paving, two parked cars in the distance and unlit wrought-iron lanterns on the walls; at the street's end, an ashlar building with a rose window and, behind it, a dome against a grey sky.
And the same street once the coaches have gone. The same paving, the same façades and a different city.José Luis Filpo Cabana / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 4.0·CC BY 4.0
What to expect from this trip, measured on what matters to someone who stays the night.
The empty city From seven in the evening until eleven in the morning
Density of heritage 259.85 ha inscribed by UNESCO in 1986, under four criteria
All on foot Two and a half square kilometres; no transport needed
Nightlife Very limited: shut by eleven
Ease of walking Steep gradients and cobbles everywhere
How much the month matters Mean high of 35.1 °C in July and almost no shade

03 How to organise the stay

Arrive in the afternoon, around five, when the groups are already heading back. Drop your things and do nothing: sit down to an early dinner and go out walking from nine, with no plan and no map. That first night is what justifies the whole trip.

The next day, get up genuinely early. Be out at eight: you have three hours of empty city before the first train and the first coach arrive. Keep whatever you want to see indoors for that window and leave midday for eating and resting, which is when the old town is impossible.

In the late afternoon, leave the old town and cross to the other side of the valley. From there you see the whole city on its hill, with the river around it: the only perspective that explains what you have spent two days walking inside. And come back in at dusk, across the bridge.

A three-storey yellow façade at the end of a small square, with a granite doorway flanked by two columns and two carved coats of arms above the lintel, iron balconies and pots in the upper window; in the foreground, four metal terrace tables with empty chairs and a furled white parasol.
An empty terrace in the old town. At this hour the city belongs to whoever sleeps in it.Yair Haklai / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0·CC BY-SA 4.0

04 What you have to accept

Three things, and I will say them plainly. First: sleeping inside the old town costs more than sleeping outside, and the plan depends entirely on it. If you stay in the new town or at a roadside hotel, you will be going up and down, and you will not go out walking at ten at night.

Second: at night there is no buzz. There is silence, stone and lamplight, and that is exactly what you came for; but if you were expecting full terraces, you will be disappointed. Eat before nine or you will not eat.

And third, the month. April, May, September and October. In July the mean high is 35.1 degrees and the old town has no tree cover; the empty city of August is empty because nobody can be outdoors, not because the coaches have left.

If you fit the profile, the argument fits in one sentence: for the price of one hotel night you will see a two-hundred-and-sixty-hectare World Heritage site with nobody in it, twice — at night and at dawn — half an hour by train from Madrid. Few things give so much for so little effort.

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Sofía Navarro

Made For You editor · Flowtravel

Sofía matches travellers with destinations, and says when they don't fit.

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