Spain’s army had tried to fly before. In 1958, according to Spanish Wikipedia, it bought Bird Dogs and a few helicopters only to see the Air Force operate them. The break came on 10 July 1965, when General Instruction 165/142 of the Central General Staff created a light aviation unit for the Brunete Armoured Division. It needed a home near Madrid and near the division, and found it at Los Remedios, just outside Colmenar Viejo on the road to Guadalix de la Sierra.

The dates of the opening differ. Spanish Wikipedia, drawing on the old FAMET history, says the first Army helicopter base was inaugurated on 27 May 1966; the Army’s own page says the national flag was raised at Los Remedios on 29 June 1966. The first aircraft are not in doubt: two Bell UH-1B Iroquois, ET-201 and ET-206, landed on 29 July 1966, and four more followed on 11 August.

The new force paid early for its learning. On 28 December 1966 a UH-1B struck a high-tension line and crashed, killing a general, a lieutenant colonel, a captain and a sergeant. Within seven years Los Remedios had grown from a single light aviation unit into the headquarters of the Fuerzas Aeromóviles del Ejército de Tierra, the name adopted on 20 March 1973.

Colonel Ángel Maté Sánchez commanded the force when it became FAMET in 1973. On 20 April 1977 helicopter ET-241, on a night training flight, struck cables close to the base at Los Remedios. Spanish Wikipedia lists seven dead: the colonel, Captains José Martínez Abadía and Casimiro Lorente Solanas, Lieutenant Colonel Michel Force, Patric Etienne, Jean Marie Uhe and José Luis Palomo. The sources used here do not say who the three men with French names were or why they were aboard, and the cause is not given beyond the collision with the cables.

The base today carries his name, Base Coronel Maté. Neither the Army pages nor Spanish Wikipedia reached for this page give the date of the renaming, so none is given here. The accident was the second at the base in just over ten years in which wires were the killer, a reminder of how new low-level night flying was to the Army in the 1970s.

The heavy-lift helicopter has been Colmenar Viejo’s signature. According to BHELTRA V’s own history, the first two CH-47C Chinooks arrived in January 1973; there were six by 1974 and nine by 1978, and the first Model 414 export Chinooks followed in 1982. A specialist blog adds that the contract was signed in 1972 and that the first three CH-47Ds were delivered in 1982. From 1991 the Cs were brought up to D standard. Spanish Wikipedia records one loss, ET-413, in 1985; the sources do not give the place or casualties.

The Chinooks have gone wherever Spain sent troops: to Kurdistan in 1991, to Tirana in 1999 to help Kosovar refugees, to Afghanistan and, with Task Force Toro, to Taji in Iraq from 18 June 2018, where three HT-17s flew alongside two Cougars until the Chinooks came home at the end of 2020 for modernisation. The Army’s Iraq summary credits the task force with more than 7,000 flying hours.

The modernisation turned the fleet into CH-47Fs. The first landed at Santander on 25 November 2021 (blog); the Army dates the first handover to 28 January 2022. The last CH-47D, ET-419, made its final flight on 1 April 2024, and Boeing delivered the 17th CH-47F on 15 October 2024. The Army data sheet gives the HT.17 room for 30 passengers and 8,172 kg of payload, and three M240 machine guns. In May 2025 one of them left Colmenar Viejo with the helicopters deploying to Slovakia.

Colmenar Viejo is also where the Army makes its aviators. The academy’s history begins with the instruction office of Helicopter Unit XI in 1972; on 20 March 1973, with the creation of FAMET, it became the Centro de Instrucción y Aplicación (CIAFAM), recognised as a teaching centre on 9 May 1975 and renamed CEFAMET on 14 June 1976. On 6 October 2017 it became the Academia de Aviación del Ejército de Tierra, received its standard on 7 May 2021, and produced its first officer graduates of the new aviation specialty that July.

Training moved to the EC135 in December 2005, when the first two arrived. A specialist blog counts 12 with the academy and four with the emergency battalion, and says the academy fleet passed 50,000 flying hours on 14 November 2022. The Airbus contract of December 2025 is meant to replace them with the H145M from 2028. The academy now also teaches unmanned-aircraft operators, which is where the Army’s drone future is being trained, if not yet flown, at this base.