We are staying at Camping Internacionale Aranjuez which is around 40km south of Madrid. It’s a great place to stay if you wish to visit Madrid as the train takes only 45 minutes and the station here is around a 20 minute walk from the campsite.

Anyhow, we aren’t here to visit Madrid, just a stopover on our final leg of the journey back to blighty.

We did however visit the Royal Palace of Aranjuez, in the freezing cold and wet. Apparently this inclement weather is over most of mainland Europe presently but all is set to clear at the weekend.

The Royal Palace of Aranjuez (or Palacio Real de Aranjuez in Spanish) is a residence of the King of Spain, and is open to the public as one of the Spanish royal sites.

It was commissioned by Philip II and designed by Juan Bautista de Toledo and Juan de Herrera, who also designed El Escorial. It was completed during the reign of Ferdinand VI by the mid-18th century; Charles III had two wings added to it.

The huge gardens, built to relieve its royal residents from the dust and drought of the Spanish meseta using the waters of the adjacent Tagus and Jarama rivers, are Spain’s most important of the Habsburg period. The Jardín de la Isla is on a man-made island bounded by the River Tagus and the Ría Canal.