New Castle of Manzanares el Real with an arch between them. New Castle of Manzanares el Real The New Castle of Manzanares el Real, also known as Castle of los Mendoza, is a palace-fortress erected in the 15th century in the town of Manzanares el Real (Community of Madrid, Spain), next to the Santillana reservoir at the foot of Sierra de Guadarrama mountain range. Its construction began in 1475 on a Romanesque-Mudéjar hermitage and today is one of the best preserved castles of the Community of Madrid. It was raised on the river Manzanares, as a residential palace of the House of Mendoza, in the vicinity
Soto del Real it is protected inside the Parque Regional de la Cuenca Alta del Manzanares. It borders with Manzanares el Real on the West, Miraflores de la Sierra on the East, Colmenar Viejo on the South, and Rascafría on the North. Soto del Real encompasses a variety of terrains: mountain tops, slopes, and the Manzanares-Guadalix tectonic pit. The urban nucleus is inside the pit, going through the Mediano, Chozas and Matarrubias streams, which flow into the Santillana reservoir, so they are tributaries of the Manzanares river. Geologically speaking, it is divided into the Mountain range, where there is a predominance of Gneiss