What should I avoid in Segovia?

Skip Mesón de Cándido for lunch. The restaurant sits under the arches on Plaza del Azoguejo, where staff carve the cochinillo with the edge of a plate and then smash the plate on the floor, a show that pulls in coach groups from Madrid every weekend. The cochinillo at Cándido is fine, but you pay roughly €25 to €30 a portion for the theatre and the view, about $28 to $34 at the current rate of 0.894 euros to the dollar. José María on Calle Cronista Lecea is five minutes uphill toward Plaza Mayor: the skin there is crisper and cracks audibly under the knife, and the front bar is loud with Segovians at 14:00. Avoid the photo menus around Plaza Mayor that sell a cheap 'menú cochinillo'; these tend to serve a reheated rib section, and you can smell the old fryer oil from the door. If the menu itself worries you, judiones de La Granja are giant white beans stewed with chorizo, smoky and soft, and they make a safe first order at any Segovia bar.

The second mistake is the rushed Madrid day trip. Most coach tours give you about four hours, which covers the Aqueduct, a queue at the Royal Alcázar and a glance into Segovia Cathedral, with no time to sit down. Stay one night in Segovia instead. After about 18:00 the tour groups head back to Madrid, Calle Real goes quiet enough that you hear your own footsteps on the granite, and the floodlit Roman arches, which date to around AD 200, glow amber against the night sky. On Saturdays and Sundays, book the Alcázar online. The Torre de Juan II needs a separate ticket and about 150 narrow steps, and the wind at the top bites even in October. Guides on Plaza del Azoguejo still repeat that Walt Disney modelled Cinderella's castle on the Alcázar, but that story appears to have no documented basis.

Don't try to walk from Segovia-Guiomar, the AVE and Avant station. It sits about 5 km south of the Aqueduct next to a motorway, and nothing along that route passes for pleasant pavement. Urban bus line 11 meets most trains and reaches the Aqueduct in about 15 minutes for roughly €2, which makes the taxi queue outside Guiomar a gamble worth skipping, particularly when a full train from Madrid-Chamartín empties at once and the line grows fast. The coach from Madrid's Moncloa interchange sidesteps the problem entirely, because Segovia's bus station is a 10-minute walk from Plaza del Azoguejo. If you rent a car, ignore the satnav when it steers you inside the walls: cameras control access to much of the old center, and the fine arrives at your rental company weeks after you've gone home. Use the paid car parks around Paseo de Ezequiel González and walk up.

Segovia sits at roughly 1,000 metres, and first-timers tend to pack for Madrid. At 13:00 on 9 October 2026 it was 9.4°C under partly cloudy skies, with a feels-like reading of 7.5°C, and late-autumn nights often fall close to freezing. The granite setts on Calle Real get slick after rain, and in January ice can linger in the shade below the Cathedral. Snow sometimes closes the Puerto de Navacerrada road into Guadarrama National Park, so check its status before planning a hike there. Crime is a smaller worry: TTDI rates Segovia 7.5/10 for solo-traveler safety (see the TTDI Solo-Safety Index), and the realistic risk is a phone lifted from a back pocket in the Azoguejo crowd on a Saturday afternoon.