Sitting above and to the right of Cercedilla is the Navalmedio dam and its reservoir which I first heard about from the previous owners of our cabin while we were finalizing the purchase. They said it was a nice walk from the cabin, and I was quite confused thinking they were talking about the Navacerrada reservoir which is quite far away. So early excursions from the cabin centered on exploring and finding the reservoir. Read on for what I have learned about it!
What you see above are all the walks and hikes we have done in Cercedilla.
The gif was last updated 26/04/2026 and has 30 walks that we have done and my objective is to paint the entire town and mountains orange!
When we first thought of getting cabin in the sierra mountains near Madrid, our first thought was of Cercedilla as we had some great hikes and experiences in the red pine forests around it, and as we have begun exploring it has not disappointed! Read on for more details and our discoveries!
The above image is the drawings that I fed to Claude Code and the resulting working watchface for a Pebble Watch that was produced after 5 sessions (each one lasting until i burned through my tokens which was about 20 minutes a session).
People are bad talking “vibe coding”, but quite honestly “agentic coding” is so empowering! Read on for more details of the adventure!
I have another post about the wild flowers at the magical Ermita de San Antonio but have begun noticing other wildflowers that are at higher elevations or maybe just have not yet seen them there, so I will start a new reference note to the flowers I discover on my walks around Cercedilla.
Today, the first day of Spring of 2026, was unfortunately cloudy and raining all day, but fortunately this afternoon there was a pause in the rain and we were able to take a walk to the Ermita de San Antonio. Possibly due to the sky being grey and our attention not bound to the horizon, we noticed that all the rocks are cover in splotches of all sorts of different colors. My wife commented that it was because the rocks in the the Sierra around Madrid have a lot of granite (correct) and I said I thought that it was due to lichen (also correct). Read on for what I learned once we got home and I began investigating!
That was exciting! Yesterday morning I was having saturday morning coffee in bed doing a bit of prompt driven development to add weather predictions to my Remarkable sleep screen when suddenly weird things started happing on Ersa, a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B that hosts everything in my house including this blog. By weird I mean I was trying to create a new file but said it was a read only file system. I figured I had run out of space, but was not the case, so I opted for a “windows” solution: reboot. And that was all she wrote and Ersa did not come backup. The picture above is the open heart intervention on Ersa trying to figure out what was going on. Read on for the frantic recovery actions and a incident postmortem retrospective to ensure this learning experience leads to improvements!
Collection of my notes on OpenClaw (hope it does not change its name again!)
Collection of my notes on Pebble Watch
