Live cameras in Collado-Villalba, Spain

Collado Villalba is a town of about 67,000 people in the northwest of the Community of Madrid, set at roughly 917 meters above sea level in the foothills of the Sierra de Guadarrama, about forty kilometers from the center of Madrid. It is often called the gateway to the sierra, because the main road and rail routes from the capital toward the mountains, Segovia and the northwest all pass through here. The old village grew slowly around its parish church and the station, then expanded rapidly from the 1960s as families from Madrid built homes and second residences in the cooler mountain air. Today it is a busy commuter and shopping center for the towns of the sierra, with granite boulders and pine-covered slopes rising just beyond the last streets.

What the cameras show

Collado-Villalba's views are DGT cameras, run by Spain's national traffic authority, with a still picture refreshed every few minutes. The town sits on the A-6 motorway, the main route from Madrid to Galicia, and just past Villalba the AP-6 toll section begins its climb to the Guadarrama tunnels, while the M-601 heads up toward the Navacerrada pass. These cameras are useful for seeing commuter congestion toward Madrid and for checking snow and ice on the mountain approaches in winter, when the DGT sometimes restricts trucks or requires chains higher up.

Collado Villalba follows Central European Time. Weekday traffic toward Madrid is heaviest early in the morning, and on Friday and Sunday evenings the A-6 fills with weekend travelers going to and from the sierra and Castile. Winters are colder than in the capital, with frost and occasional snowfall, and the first snow on the peaks often brings a rush of day-trippers. Summer daylight lasts until about ten.

Nearby, the royal monastery of El Escorial is a short drive west, and the high pine forests and granite peaks of the Guadarrama National Park rise just to the north.

Sources: Collado Villalba - Wikipedia · Sierra de Guadarrama National Park - Wikipedia · DGT infocar traffic information (Spain).