Chinchón's Plaza Mayor seen from the colonnaded galleries, green wooden balconies on three tiers

A weekend in Chinchón from Madrid

You're flying into Madrid, and 55 minutes by direct bus takes you to a village where a medieval square looks nothing like anything the capital built — irregular, improvised, tiered with green wooden balconies, and nearly silent on a Sunday morning before the Madrid day-trippers arrive. That is why Chinchón earns a weekend.

The case for two days isn't about sightseeing volume. Day 1 covers the Plaza Mayor (historic main square), the Goya altarpiece in the parish church above it, and a proper Castilian lunch with a copa seco of anís de Chinchón (anise-flavored liqueur, Designation of Origin since 1989 — available in seco/dry, dulce/sweet, and semi-seco) alongside roast lamb. Day 2 delivers the thing you paid the accommodation price for: the plaza in the Sunday-morning quiet, the altarpiece at leisure, and a bottle of anís seco in the bag before the return bus to Madrid. A day-tripper gets the sights. A weekend gives you the place.

Why Chinchón is worth two days from Madrid

Chinchón earns the overnight because Day 1 and Day 2 are different experiences — not the same experience repeated at a lower crowd level — and because the Sunday-morning plaza before the first Madrid bus arrives is something you cannot buy with a day-trip ticket.

Take the Plaza Mayor first. Madrid has its own Plaza Mayor, so the comparison is unavoidable — and it's the argument. Madrid's square is a 17th-century royal commission: rigid symmetry, uniform stone arcades, a geometry that says authority. Chinchón's is the opposite. Built gradually from the 15th century and enclosed by the 17th, it has an irregular shape that follows the hillside rather than a surveyor's plan, columns that are mismatched in height and spacing, and 234 green-painted wooden balconies that jut out at different angles on three-story arcade houses. The result looks less like a designed plaza and more like a hillside town that slowly turned inward on itself and liked what it found. On a Saturday afternoon in spring it is busy, loud with lunch service, chairs scraping on stone. On Sunday morning before the first bus from Madrid empties out, it is nearly the only plaza in the Madrid orbit where you can stand in the middle and hear your own breathing.

Above the plaza, up a short flight of steps from the northeast corner, the Iglesia de Nuestra Señora de la Asunción holds Francisco de Goya's The Assumption of the Virgin (c. 1812) on the main altarpiece. This is not a minor work filed in a side chapel. It is the central painting of the church, framed by the full altarpiece structure, painted by Goya in his mid-60s for his brother Camilo, who served as chaplain to the counts of Chinchón. Most English-language travel writing about Chinchón mentions the church in passing, if at all. The painting barely appears. That gap is the editorial argument: a late-period Goya, on the main altarpiece of a village parish church serving roughly 5,000 people, free to enter, without a queue, without the Prado's institutional framing telling you how to feel about it.

And then there's anís de Chinchón. The spirit has been produced in this town since 1777. It received its own Geographic Denomination in 1989 — named, specifically, for Chinchón. González Byass now produces it at the Alcoholera de Chinchón. Drinking a copa seco here, in the town the liqueur is named after, is a different act than ordering anís at a Madrid bar. The payoff comes on Day 2 morning, when you buy the bottle before the bus.

Iglesia de Nuestra Señora de la Asunción facade above stone steps, Plaza Mayor in foreground
The approach to La Asunción from the plaza's northeast corner — a five-minute uphill walk to a late Goya. Zarateman / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Getting there from Madrid

Bus line 337 — operated by La Veloz under the Consorcio Regional de Transportes de Madrid — runs direct from Madrid to Chinchón with no transfers. The journey takes approximately 55–70 minutes and costs around €4–€6 each way (redtransporte.com, CRTM, June 2026).

One detail to check before you go: as of February 2025, the Madrid departure terminus for line 337 moved from Conde de Casal to Pavones / Avda. Fuente Carrantona, due to interchange construction works expected to last approximately two years. Pavones is served by Metro line 1. Many travel guides and apps still show Conde de Casal as the starting point — don't trust them until they catch up.

Quick reference — Getting there

Day 1 — Plaza Mayor, Goya, and the Castilian table

Day 1 covers Chinchón's three substantive draws in natural walking order — the plaza, the church above it, and a long lunch with roast lamb and the local anisette — with an optional walk to the castle exterior rounding out the afternoon.

The Plaza Mayor

Chinchón's Plaza Mayor is a medieval square unlike anything the royal city planners built in Madrid — irregular in shape, mismatched in its columns, and alive with a specific architectural logic that becomes clear once you walk the full perimeter.

Step off the bus and head straight for it. The square opens gradually as you approach from the main road — there is no grand arrival gate, just a narrowing of streets until suddenly you are standing under the arcade and the wooden balconies are three stories above you and the whole elliptical-ish space fans out in every direction at once. Walk the perimeter under the arcade columns. Notice that the columns are not the same height and not the same spacing — this is medieval construction, built to house and adjusted over centuries, not a royal geometry. The green paint on the balconies is the same shade everywhere because it is maintained that way; the balconies themselves are not. Bullfighting has taken place on this square since the 17th century. In August, those balconies fill with hundreds of spectators watching the corrida (bullfight) in what may be the most specific use of a plaza's architecture anywhere in Spain. You are standing in a functioning performance space. Try to see that while it's quiet enough to look.

Quick reference — Plaza Mayor

The Goya altarpiece at La Asunción

The Iglesia de Nuestra Señora de la Asunción holds one of the most overlooked late-period Goyas in Spain — The Assumption of the Virgin (c. 1812) — painted for a village parish church and still visible there today without a queue or an entry fee.

Walk up from the plaza's northeast corner. It is a five-minute uphill pull on stone steps; the church facade is modest, with no prominent "Goya inside" signage at street level. This is precisely why most visitors walk past it. The interior is a Gothic-Renaissance-Baroque layering in the way Spanish churches often are — built in 1534, added to, damaged by French military action in 1808, nicknamed "the church without a tower" because the French took the bell tower. The main altarpiece is at the far end. And there it is: Goya's painting, full-frame in the retablo (altarpiece), the Virgin ascending through the kind of chromatic transparency he was exploring in his late period — the garments around her are light in a way that was considered unconventional when the painting was delivered. Goya was in his mid-60s when he painted this. His brother Camilo had commissioned it from his post as chaplain to the counts of Chinchón. The biographical line — a great painter, late in his life, doing a favor for his brother in a village church — is visible in the work. Stand in front of it without a crowd and without a museum audio guide and see what you think.

Quick reference — Iglesia de la Asunción

Anís tasting — a copa seco at the source

Anís de Chinchón has been produced in this town since 1777 under the Alcoholera de Chinchón (now González Byass), and the Geographic Denomination awarded in 1989 is named specifically for Chinchón — which makes drinking a copa here a different act than ordering anís at any Madrid bar.

Before lunch, stop at one of the bars on the plaza and order a copa seco. Anís seco is the locally preferred style: dry and clean, with none of the sweetness that makes the dulce version more accessible to first-timers. The seco is sharper, more aromatic, and the thing the town actually drinks. You are not ordering a tourist drink. You are ordering what the residents have been ordering in this square for two and a half centuries. Sit with it for a few minutes before the restaurants open.

Quick reference — Anís tasting

Lunch on the plaza — cochinillo, lamb, and the Castilian table

Lunch at the Plaza Mayor is where the Day 1 itinerary settles into its proper register — a long Castilian roast at a balcony table overlooking the square you just spent the morning in, with a second copa seco alongside the lamb.

By 13:30, the plaza restaurants are filling. Café de la Iberia — operating since 1986, with balcony tables directly on the square — and Restaurante Plaza Mayor are the two most consistent options for the full Castilian roast. Order the cordero asado (roast lamb) or the cochinillo (roast suckling pig). Order the judiones de matanza (a hearty bean stew made with large local dried beans and cured meats, a Castilian specialty) as a companion dish — it is thick, earthy, and appears on few menus outside the Castile-La Mancha corridor. The balcony tables facing the plaza are limited; a reservation call the morning of — or the night before — saves you an indoor seat.

Quick reference — Lunch

Chinchón Castle — the hilltop view

The castle exterior gives you the one view you cannot get from the plaza itself: the Plaza Mayor's unusual shape from above, and the story of where anís de Chinchón began.

From the plaza, it is about a five-minute uphill walk to the hilltop above the castle ruins. The castle itself — a 15th-to-16th-century structure belonging to the Counts of Chinchón, damaged by Polish troops fighting for the French in 1808 — is private property, fenced off, and not accessible inside. Don't go looking for an entrance. The point is the view: from the hill above the ruins you can see the Plaza Mayor below at an angle that reveals how irregular its shape really is, the balconied houses following the hillside's own geometry rather than any planner's grid. One historical footnote worth knowing: an earlier incarnation of the anís distillery operated inside these ruins in the 19th century. The spirit literally started here.

Quick reference — Castle exterior

Where to stay overnight

Stay as close to the Plaza Mayor as possible — the quiet you come back for in the morning is the quiet of that specific square, and you want to be two minutes from it when Sunday starts.

Chinchón has a small collection of hotels and casas rurales (rural guesthouses) within easy walking distance of the plaza; a room with a balcony facing the square is the premium option, and worth requesting specifically when booking. Accommodation supply is limited — the town has around 5,000 residents and the hotel inventory reflects that. On Easter Saturday (the Passion re-enactment) and mid-August patron fiesta weekends, rooms fill weeks ahead; if your visit coincides with either event, book early or adjust your dates.

Chinchón's Plaza Mayor in early Sunday morning light, green wooden balconies in soft shadow
Chinchón's Plaza Mayor on a Sunday morning before the first Madrid bus arrives — the reason you stayed. Manuel M. Vicente / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Day 2 — The Sunday morning the overnight earns

Day 2 is structurally lighter than Day 1 — fewer anchors, slower pace — because the point is a quality of time rather than a quantity of sights.

The plaza at Sunday-morning quiet

The Plaza Mayor in Sunday-morning quiet — before the first bus from Madrid has arrived and before any coach parties have pulled into the car park — is the specific experience that makes the overnight worth paying for.

Come down around 8:00 or 8:30. The bars on the ground floor of the arcades are open for locals having coffee; a few residents cross the square with dogs; the wooden balconies are closed. In an hour or two, the dynamic starts to shift. By 10:30 the first visitors appear. By noon it's lunch service again. But for that early window, you have the place in a way that a day-tripper arriving on the first Saturday bus will never have. The silence in the square is a particular kind — not empty, but contained. The arcade columns cast long morning shadows across the stone. The irregular shape of the plaza, which looks like a performance space all set up and waiting for its actors, feels different when you are the only person in it.

Walk the perimeter again, slowly. You saw it yesterday at full volume. This is what the set looks like before the show.

Back to the Goya at leisure

If you moved quickly through the church on Day 1 — or the hours were short and the visit brief — Day 2's morning is the time to return.

The Iglesia de la Asunción sees far less foot traffic on Sunday morning than on a busy Saturday afternoon. Arriving when the church first opens, you may be the only visitor in the nave. The Goya altarpiece rewards a second look: the chromatic work in the figures surrounding the ascending Virgin, the unusual transparency of her garments, the particular intimacy of a painting made for a parish community by someone who could have painted for a palace. Goya in his mid-60s, his brother in the chaplaincy, a village church in Castile. Without the Prado's gallery context framing the work for you, the painting sits there and you sit with it.

Quick reference — Church return

Anís seco — the morning copa and the bottle

This morning it is a dry copa at a bar on the plaza serving the local crowd, and a bottle of anís seco from the Alcoholera de Chinchón in the bag before the return bus to Madrid.

By 9:30 or 10:00, the bars on and near the Plaza Mayor are serving locals. Order an anís seco — in a town that has been producing the spirit since 1777, at a bar where the locals drink it in the morning, this is the form it takes without tourist packaging. The seco is dry and clean, nothing like the licorice sweetness the dulce variety offers. Then go to one of the town's shops and buy a bottle. The dulce travels better as a gift; the seco is what you were drinking. Both run €10–€18 depending on size and variant. The anís de Chinchón bottle in your bag on the bus home is the one souvenir from this trip that is actually specific to this town.

Quick reference — Anís

Back to Madrid

Chinchón to Madrid is the same 55–70 minutes on the return bus — line 337 from the town center, back to Pavones / Avenida de Fuente Carrantona, then Metro line 1 into the center, with the last service from Chinchón running approximately 23:00. A mid-afternoon departure (15:00–16:00) is the right call if you are flying the same day from Barajas.

You're flying into Madrid, and now you've done what the day-trippers didn't: the plaza in the Sunday morning quiet, the Goya without a crowd, and a bottle of anís seco made in the town that gave it its name. The bus ride back is short. Madrid's own Plaza Mayor will look like a different kind of place when you get there.

Quick reference — Return

Practical notes

Before you travel, there are four things worth knowing: the bus terminus moved in 2025 and most guides still list the wrong stop; accommodation near the plaza is limited and books ahead for festival weekends; the anís shops and church hours need a quick verification check; and the Sunday-morning timing window that makes the overnight worthwhile closes faster than it sounds.

Bus terminus change is the most important logistics detail for 2025–2026. As of February 2025, bus 337 departs from Pavones / Avda. Fuente Carrantona, not Conde de Casal. The construction at Conde de Casal interchange is expected to last approximately two years. Any travel guide or blog from before early 2025 will have the wrong departure point — verify at crtm.es before you travel.

Weekday mornings are quieter than weekends, by a significant margin. If your schedule allows a mid-week visit instead of Saturday–Sunday, the plaza experience is qualitatively better. The weekend-card case holds, but weekday quiet is a different register again.

Book lunch in advance. Restaurants with plaza-facing balcony tables fill on Saturday lunch service by 13:00. A reservation call the morning of — or the night before — saves you an indoor table.

The church has no prominent signage from the plaza. The Iglesia de la Asunción is five minutes up from the northeast corner; there is no large "Goya" sign at street level. Walk toward the steps and keep going up. Verify hours before you travel at ciudad-chinchon.com or call the Chinchón tourist office — hours are not reliably documented in English-language sources.

Three seasonal events worth planning around. Easter Saturday: the Passion of Christ theatrical re-enactment (250 performers, dusk, the Plaza Mayor as its stage — declared of National Tourist Interest; book accommodation weeks ahead). Mid-August patron saint fiesta (August 15–16): the plaza functions as an active bullring; balcony restaurant seats fill weeks in advance. October: Garlic Festival celebrating ajo de Chinchón (Chinchón's locally grown garlic variety), with market and food stalls.

Wine and Anísette Festival — typically early April, dates vary annually — brings additional tastings and stalls to the Plaza Mayor and coincides with post-Easter tourism, making it worth timing a visit around.

Quick reference — Practical

Frequently asked questions

Is Chinchón worth a weekend from Madrid?

Yes — two days earns you things a day-tripper never gets: the Plaza Mayor in Sunday-morning quiet before the coach parties arrive, the Goya altarpiece in the Iglesia de la Asunción seen at leisure, and a morning copa of anís seco at the source. Accommodation near the plaza is good, and the bus back is under an hour.

How do I get from Madrid to Chinchón by bus?

Take bus line 337 (operated by La Veloz under the CRTM network) from Pavones / Avda. Fuente Carrantona — served by Metro line 1. The journey takes approximately 55–70 minutes and costs around €4–€6 each way. Important: as of February 2025, the terminus moved from Conde de Casal to Pavones due to interchange construction. Verify the current departure point at crtm.es before traveling.

What is anís de Chinchón and where do I try it?

Anís de Chinchón is Spain's most recognized anisette — produced in Chinchón since 1777 using green anise seed from Seville and awarded its own Geographic Denomination (Denominación Geográfica) in 1989. It comes in three styles: dulce (sweet), seco (dry, the locally preferred form), and extra dry. Try a copa at any Plaza Mayor bar for €2–€4, or buy a bottle (€10–€18) at a town shop before the return bus.

Is there really a Goya painting in Chinchón?

Yes — The Assumption of the Virgin (c. 1812) by Francisco de Goya hangs on the main altarpiece of the Iglesia de Nuestra Señora de la Asunción, a five-minute uphill walk from the Plaza Mayor. Goya painted it for his brother Camilo, chaplain to the counts of Chinchón — the transparency of the Virgin's garments was considered unconventional at delivery. Entry is free; no queue. Verify current hours at ciudad-chinchon.com before visiting.

What should I eat in Chinchón?

The signature dishes are cochinillo (roast suckling pig), lechazo or cordero asado (roast lamb), and judiones de matanza (a hearty bean stew made with large local dried beans and cured meats — a Castilian specialty). Restaurants on the Plaza Mayor serve all three; budget €20–€35 per person for a full lunch. In spring, fried ajetes (young garlic shoots) appear on most menus. Book a balcony table in advance on weekends — they fill early.

When is the best time to visit Chinchón from Madrid?

Spring (March–May) and early autumn (September–October) offer the most comfortable temperatures — 15–22°C — and pre-summer crowds; a Saturday–Sunday visit in either window is ideal. Two events that fill accommodation fast: Easter Saturday (Passion of Christ re-enactment with 250 performers — book weeks ahead) and mid-August patron fiesta (Plaza Mayor becomes an active bullring). The October Garlic Festival is lower-key and worth timing a visit around.

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