Live cameras in Aranjuez, Spain

Aranjuez is a town in the far south of the Community of Madrid, about fifty kilometers from the capital, set beside the River Tagus just upstream from where the Jarama joins it. It has about 60,000 registered residents. Philip II made it a Royal Site in 1560, and for nearly two centuries only the royal family, nobles and court servants could live here. The Royal Palace, the long avenues of plane trees, and the Garden of the Island and Garden of the Prince along the river were laid out for the spring stays of the Spanish court.

That planned landscape of palaces, gardens and irrigated orchards was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2001. Aranjuez is also known for its strawberries and asparagus, for Joaquín Rodrigo's guitar concerto named after its gardens, and for the Mutiny of Aranjuez of March 1808, when an uprising forced King Charles IV to give up the throne.

Views on the road south

Spain's Dirección General de Tráfico, the DGT, supplies every image linked to Aranjuez. Each one is a photograph swapped for a newer shot every few minutes. The A-4 motorway, the main road from Madrid to Andalusia, passes close to Aranjuez, and the cameras watch it and the nearby junctions on the approaches to town. On holiday weekends and at the start of August, the southbound A-4 can fill with traffic leaving Madrid for the coast.

Like the rest of mainland Spain, Aranjuez keeps the clock used in Paris and Berlin, which pushes sunrise and sunset late. Summer days are long and very hot, with sunsets after half past nine in June, while winter nights are cold and sometimes foggy in the river valley. The town's biggest celebration, the Fiestas del Motín in early September, reenacts the 1808 mutiny in the streets. The historic Strawberry Train from Madrid has traditionally run on selected spring and autumn weekends.

Chinchón, with its arcaded main square, is a short drive northeast, and Toledo lies about forty-five minutes to the southwest.

Sources: Aranjuez - Wikipedia · Aranjuez Cultural Landscape - UNESCO World Heritage Centre · DGT traffic information.