The Pride of the Squirrels: Naiara Villegas and the Making of a Spanish Middle-Distance Prospect
San Lorenzo de El Escorial sits in the foothills of the Guadarrama mountain range, about an hour northwest of Madrid, a town better known for its royal monastery and its pine-scented air than for producing elite athletics talent. But then, Las Ardillas — the Squirrels — arrived. Founded in 2005 with twenty children training in a park, this small community club has grown into one of the most respected youth athletics programs in Madrid, a factory of champions that has sent athletes to European championships and Olympic teams. Into this tradition stepped Naiara Villegas Maroto, born on April 2, 2009, in San Lorenzo de El Escorial, who has grown up inside the club’s distinctive culture and is now, at just seventeen years old, Spain’s reigning under-18 champion at 1,500 metres.
The name that brought you here — “Nayara Vila,” as her Instagram handle suggests — reflects a friendly nickname; her full registered name is Naiara Villegas Maroto, the name under which she competes on the national stage and in the World Athletics database. She is, without question, one of the most intriguing young middle-distance runners in Spanish athletics right now, a runner with the tactical intelligence of someone twice her age and the competitive record to back it up.
The Squirrels and the Sierra: Growing Up in Las Ardillas
To understand Naiara Villegas, you first need to understand Las Ardillas. The Club Básico de Atletismo Las Ardillas de El Escorial is not a club with elite infrastructure, fat sponsorship budgets, or a storied history stretching back generations. What it has is something arguably more valuable: a genuine community identity and a remarkable capacity for developing young athletes from scratch. When the club was founded in 2005, it trained children on the grass of Parque de La Manguilla, a park in El Escorial, because there was no athletics track. Twenty years later, there still isn’t a proper track — a long-running municipal campaign for one has made progress but has not yet delivered — and yet Las Ardillas has built a program that now regularly wins national championships in cross country and produces athletes who compete at the highest levels of Spanish youth athletics.
The club’s alumni list reads like a roll call of Madrid-region athletics: Lucía Rodríguez, who competed at the Olympics; Hicham Serroukh, the national cross country standout; Ronaldo Olivo, the sub-20 national champion; Julia Maroto, who claimed the Spanish sub-23 1,500m title indoors in early 2026. The thread connecting them all is Las Ardillas’ coaching philosophy — patient, cross-country-first development, built around team culture and collective ambition. Vicente García-Caro, who took over as sporting director in early 2023, has continued and extended that approach.
Naiara Villegas Maroto grew up inside this world. Her early competitive appearances as part of the club’s sub-12 and sub-14 squads placed her within the same group of athletes — many born in 2008 and 2009 — who would go on to become serial national champions as they aged through the sub-16 and sub-18 categories together. Cross country was the medium in which she learned to race, to hurt, and to hold form when the terrain was difficult and the competition tight.
The Sub-16 Years: National Gold and a Team Unlike Any Other
The 2022–23 cross country season saw Naiara Villegas step into a larger role within Las Ardillas’ increasingly dominant women’s program. By February 2023, she was winning races outright in the sub-16 category at regional level, including a convincing victory at the Cross de Collado Villalba, part of the Madrid cross country circuit. That same season, she was part of the Las Ardillas sub-16 team that captured the Campeonato de España de Campo a Través por Clubes — the Spanish national cross country clubs championship — in Soria, finishing 17th individually as her club’s quartet dominated the team competition by 69 points, a margin that reflected the genuine depth of their women’s group.
The sub-16 national clubs title was the second consecutive for Las Ardillas, who had won the same championship the year before at Atapuerca. Naiara Villegas was one of the scoring members of that success in Soria, alongside teammates Patricia Delgado, Rocío García Ventura, and Claudia Martínez — a group that would continue competing and winning together as they moved into the sub-18 age bracket.
Through the 2023–24 cross country season she continued building, winning the cadete femenino (under-16) race at the Pedestre Popular de Guadarrama in September 2024 with a time of 11 minutes and 34 seconds, and contributing to Las Ardillas’ strong showings at the Cross Villa de El Escorial in November 2023, where she finished fifth in the sub-16 race. The club’s women were establishing themselves as the dominant force in youth cross country in the Madrid region.
Moving Up: The Sub-18 Breakthrough
The transition to the sub-18 (under-18) age category, which in Spanish athletics corresponds roughly to the cadete-to-juvenil-to-junior progression, opened a new chapter for Villegas in 2025. She was now competing in the demanding middle ground between national youth athletics and the senior world beginning to come into view, and her times on the track were beginning to reflect genuine development as a middle-distance specialist.
On July 6, 2025, she ran a 1,500 metres personal best of 4:40.24 in Castellón, at the Pistes d’Atletisme Gaetà Huguet. That time, while not yet elite by national standards, represented a meaningful benchmark for a fifteen-year-old with plenty of room to improve. More significant in some ways was what it signalled about her trajectory: she was no longer just a cross country runner who happened to race on the track. The middle-distance identity was taking shape.
The autumn cross country season of 2025 brought further confirmation of her standing. At the 60th edition of the Campeonato de España de Campo a Través por Clubes, held at the Cross Internacional de Atapuerca in November 2025, Naiara Villegas and her Las Ardillas teammates produced another collective tour de force. Finishing 9th individually — in 14 minutes and 42 seconds over the demanding sub-18 course — she was the third scoring member of a squad that dominated the team competition, with Patricia Delgado and Rocío García Ventura leading the way individually before Claudia Martínez completed the scoring quartet. Las Ardillas won the team gold by 40 points over Safor-Teika, securing a third national cross country clubs title for this remarkable generation of athletes from El Escorial.
Antequera and the National Indoor Title
The indoor track season of 2025–26 was when Naiara Villegas stepped fully into the spotlight as an individual. The season opened with strong short-track performances in Madrid: a 1,500m short track personal best of 4:41.51 in Madrid on February 14, 2026, and then — the performance that announced her nationally — an 800m personal best of 2:15.26 at the Gallur facility in Madrid on February 28, 2026. Both performances came in the context of her preparation for the Spanish Under-18 Indoor Championships.
The Spanish Sub-18 Short Track Championship was held at the Centro de Tecnificación de Antequera in March 2026. Going in, Villegas was a serious contender at 1,500 metres, and she delivered the kind of race that national titles are built on. She dominated her semifinal, controlling the pace and qualifying with authority. In the final, she bided her time behind Elena Torres, the Andalusian cross country champion who set the early pace, and Remei Verónica, who took the lead at the bell. Villegas waited, made her decisive move on the final bend — a change of pace that none of her rivals could match — and crossed the line first in 4:41.94, winning by 81 hundredths of a second over Verónica, with Claudia Santamarta of the Universidad de León in third.
It was her second national gold of the winter season: earlier that same stretch of competition, she had also contributed to Las Ardillas’ team gold at the National cross country clubs championship in Antequera — meaning she arrived at the track championships already carrying a team national title on her shoulders. Winning the individual crown, too, made it a double gold winter. The local sports press in San Lorenzo de El Escorial framed the achievement in the context of Las Ardillas’ remarkable record: the title “amplía la leyenda de Las Ardillas” — expands the legend of Las Ardillas — a headline that captured both the individual achievement and the club culture from which it emerged.
The January 2026 National Cross and a Regional Team Achievement
In between the cross clubs championship and the indoor track title, Villegas also competed as part of the Madrid sub-18 selection at the Campeonato de España de Cross por Selecciones Autonómicas in January 2026. The Madrid team finished second in the sub-18 femenino team competition with 28 points — the Comunidad Valenciana took gold with 22 — and Villegas was one of the five-runner squad that secured that silver alongside Sandra Velasco Antón, Luna Ros Lara, Claudia Martínez Blázquez, and Jimena Jiménez Valsalobre. For an athlete who had been competing at sub-16 level just a year prior, representing her autonomous community at the national cross championship and earning a team podium was another mark of her growing stature.
Personal Bests at a Glance
- 800 metres: 2:15.26 — Gallur, Madrid, February 28, 2026 (indoor)
- 800 metres short track: 2:15.26 — Gallur, Madrid, February 28, 2026
- 1,500 metres: 4:40.24 — Pistes Gaetà Huguet, Castellón, July 6, 2025
- 1,500 metres short track: 4:41.51 — Gallur, Madrid, February 14, 2026
- 3,000 metres: 10:15.99 — Gallur, Madrid, March 1, 2026 (indoor)
She currently holds World Athletics ranking #24264 in the overall women’s standings, with active 2026 season’s bests on record. Her World Athletics code is 15173185.
A Club That Produces Champions
One of the most compelling aspects of Naiara Villegas’ story is the environment in which it is unfolding. Las Ardillas is not an elite athletics academy. It charges modest fees, trains in public spaces, has produced champions without a proper athletics track, and operates on the principle that great running can be built anywhere if the coaching is sound and the culture is right. The club’s coaching philosophy — patient, cross-country-rooted, team-first — produces athletes who know how to hurt, how to hold form under pressure, and how to compete without flinching.
Villegas has grown up surrounded by athletes who have been ahead of her and shown her what Las Ardillas can produce. She trained alongside the generation that included Julia Maroto and athletes who went on to be national champions and internationals. Now, at seventeen, she is part of that tradition herself, adding her name to the long list of Ardillas athletes who have climbed to the top of their age group. The difference is that she may be the best middle-distance runner the club has produced yet — the one whose senior career, still several years away, could take her beyond the national youth titles that have become almost routine for this remarkable little club in the Sierra.
What Comes Next
Naiara Villegas Maroto turns seventeen in April 2026. She remains in the sub-18 age bracket through the 2027 season, which means the outdoor Spanish Under-18 Championships — scheduled for Castellón in July 2026, the same track where she set her 1,500m personal best — are very much on the horizon, as is further cross country development through the 2026–27 season. The European Athletics Under-18 Championships, which take place every two years, offer a further horizon for an athlete of her calibre as she matures.
Her 800m and 1,500m times are moving in the right direction for a sixteen-year-old. A 2:15.26 at 800m and a 4:40.24 at 1,500m leave significant room for growth; the best Spanish junior women are running around 2:02–2:05 for 800m and sub-4:15 for 1,500m. But trajectory matters more than absolute marks at this stage, and the trajectory for Villegas has been consistently upward, season by season, from cross country victories in the sub-14 category to an indoor national title at sub-18. There is no reason to think the direction changes.
The coaching environment at Las Ardillas, the team culture she has trained inside since childhood, and the evidence of her own competitive intelligence — the willingness to sit and wait in a championship race, the capacity to make a decisive move when it counts — all point toward an athlete who is still becoming what she will be.
No individual sponsorships have been publicly announced for Naiara Villegas. No personal social media presence under her competition name has been confirmed for attribution purposes; she uses the Instagram handle @nayaravila_. The Club de Atletismo Las Ardillas can be followed at @ardillasescorial on Instagram and at atletismoardillas.es, where the club documents its athletes’ achievements in exceptional detail.
San Lorenzo’s Newest Chapter
San Lorenzo de El Escorial has the Monastery of El Escorial — one of the grandest buildings in Spain, eight towers rising above the pines, a monument to the ambitions of Philip II. It has the Parque de La Manguilla, a park that doubles as a cross country course every November when Las Ardillas hosts the Cross Villa de El Escorial. And now it has Naiara Villegas Maroto, a teenager who grew up running in that park and who is beginning to run her name into the longer record of what this small mountain town’s sport has produced.
She won’t stop at seventeen. The best of her story is still being written.
Naiara Villegas Maroto (born April 2, 2009) is a Spanish middle-distance runner specialising in the 800 metres and 1,500 metres. She competes for Club Básico de Atletismo Las Ardillas de El Escorial and trains under the club’s sports program directed by Vicente García-Caro. She is the reigning Spanish Under-18 indoor champion at 1,500 metres and a three-time Spanish national cross country clubs champion (2x sub-16, 1x sub-18) with Las Ardillas. Her World Athletics athlete code is 15173185.
