Day trips from Madrid → By car → Patones
Patones de Arriba
Patones de Arriba is a village built entirely from black slate, stacked up a hillside an hour north of Madrid. It was abandoned in the 1960s when the residents moved down to the main road, then bought up and restored — so what you walk through now is a preserved seventeenth-century village of about forty houses, most of them restaurants.
By Saad Madhoun · Living in Madrid since 2023 · Updated 10 August 2026
| Drive time | ~1 h from Madrid · 65 km (40 miles) |
|---|---|
| Time needed | 1.5 hours plus lunch. It is very small |
| Go for | Black slate architecture and a long lunch |
| Pair with | Buitrago, 25 minutes north |
| Cars can’t go up into the village. Park below in Patones de Abajo and walk — it’s about fifteen minutes uphill. | |
| Last checked: 10 August 2026. Most restaurants here close midweek out of season — check before driving up on a Tuesday in February. | |
Two Patones
This confuses people, so: Patones de Abajo is the modern village on the road, where people live and where you park. Patones de Arriba is the old village up the hill, which is the one you came for. The walk between them is about fifteen minutes and it is uphill on the way there.
Everything in the upper village is built from the local black slate — walls, roofs, lintels, steps — which gives it a uniformity that whitewashed villages don’t have. It’s a small place: you can walk every street in half an hour.
The king of Patones
The village’s story is that it was so isolated and so poor that it governed itself, choosing its own “king” — and that neither Philip II nor Napoleon’s armies ever bothered with it. Whether the kings were real or a nineteenth-century embellishment is unresolved; the isolation certainly was.
Patones is 90 minutes. Plan around that.
The village is small and honest about it. Set your day and see what to add.
Lunch is the point, and that’s fine
Patones de Arriba is, functionally, a restaurant village. Almost every restored slate house is a place to eat, and Madrid drives up at weekends specifically for that. The food is Castilian and the settings are good — thick stone walls, fires in winter, terraces looking down the valley in summer.
It’s worth being clear-eyed: you’re not discovering a forgotten hamlet, you’re visiting a very well-restored one that makes its living from lunch. It’s still a lovely couple of hours, and the slate is genuinely unusual.
Patones questions
Can you drive into Patones de Arriba?
No. Park in Patones de Abajo on the main road and walk up — about fifteen minutes, uphill. The old village is closed to traffic, which is part of why it works.
Is Patones worth visiting?
For a couple of hours and a good lunch, yes — the black slate architecture is unlike anything else near Madrid. It’s very small, so combine it with Buitrago 25 minutes north.