History
For much of its history the central part of the range, including the forests and grasslands on both sides of the mountains, was associated with the city of Segovia, at least as far back as its Roman control under the name of Segóbriga. However, after the creation of the province of Madrid to meet the requirements of the Spanish Court, the political designation of the mountains was distributed between the two provinces. Today the range is more often associated with Madrid given that city's prominence as Spain's capital.
The Guadarramas' role as a natural barrier has been of importance in many of the armed conflicts that have afflicted Spain. For centuries the range constituted a border between the Christian kingdoms to the north and Muslims kingdoms to the south, during the times of Reconquest. The legacy of that epoch can be seen in the splendid medieval walled cities occupying both sides of the mountains, such as Buitrago de Lozoya and Manzanares el Real in Madrid, and the Castillo de Pedraza in Segovia.
In 1808, during the Peninsular War fought by Spain against invaders from France, the Battle of Somosierra took place at the range's Somosierra Pass, where the Spanish were defeated by Napoleonic troops composed principally of Polish lancers. Likewise, throughout the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, the range comprised an important front with skirmishes fought in the mountain passes. Today, trenches and gun emplacements still survive along the line of the mountains' summits.
The Guadarramas, as a result of their proximity to high population centres of cultural and educational importance, was one of the first areas of Spain where natural resources and the study of nature came to be valued, both for economic and educational reasons. This culminated in the establishment of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza (Free Institution of Education) in 1876, which advocated an assimilation into Madrid's cultural values of the nearby mountain range's natural beauty. By the 1920s, there was a call to declare the entire range a protected national park; a notion that is still unrealized but has support today.
Read more about this topic: Sierra De Guadarrama
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