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Northwest of Madrid, in the foothills of the Sierra de Guadarrama, is one of Spain's best-known and most visited sights - Felipe II's vast monastery-palace of El Escorial . Travel writers tend to go into frenzies about the symbolism of this building - "a stone image of the mind of its founder" was how the nineteenth-century writer Augustus Hare described it - and it is indeed a key historic sight. The town around the monastery, San Lorenzo del Escorial , is an easy day-trip from Madrid, or if you plan to travel on, rail and road routes continue to Avila and Segovia. The heart of the Sierra de Guadarrama , too, lies just to the north, offering Madrid's easiest mountain escape. Tours from Madrid to El Escorial often take in El Valle de los Caidos (The Valley of the Fallen), 9km north. This is an equally megalomaniac yet far more chilling monument: an underground basilica hewn under Franco's orders, allegedly as a monument to the Civil War dead of both sides, though in reality as a memorial to the Generalismo and his regime.
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