The road to Ronda: Can it get better than this?

 March 15, 2012 

A DAY driving through tightly winding mountain roads with stupendous views around every corner, in a landscape dotted with pueblos blancos – little white villages, usually perched on a peak around a ruined Moorish castle – and culminating in a visit to Ronda, one of the most spectacularly located towns in Spain. It was all staggeringly beautiful.

We left Tarifa with its strong winds, where the fishing boats were busy spreading their nets to catch the poor old tuna coming in from the Atlantic, and a tall ship was setting sail into the Med, and bade a fond farewell to Café con Leche, the brown and white mongrel – I’d call him freewheeling rather than a stray - who did a daily round of the site looking for food and the occasional gesture of affection. When last seen, he was stationed immovably outside the motorhome of a German-owned Jack Russell bitch on heat.

Heading north to Ronda de la Frontera we passed through a landscape of orange groves – many seemingly blighted by the cold winter, because half the trees were brown and dead-looking - and green farming country, very popular with cyclists. We stopped to photograph a horse tied up outside a bar at midday – and I couldn’t help wondering what state his owner would be in by the time he rode home - and then followed the A405 up towards Gaucin.

Here was a vantage point where you could look back at least 20 miles to the coast, and see Gibraltar and the mountains of North Africa. You could also, if you were David, spot a Sardinian warbler and three griffon vultures.

On past the most picturesque village of all to my mind, Algatocin, and we were up to 1,000 metres above sea level, with a short-toed eagle hanging in the wind, hunting for snakes on the valley floor below. The rock faces were getting barer now, with fewer trees, just rocky scrubland.

Then Ronda – still way up high, but set in a kind of basin amid the mountains that reminded me of the rim of a volcano, and then perched astride a dramatic ravine. What an awe-inspiring location.  The guidebook tells me its position is so impregnable that it was one of the last Moorish bastions, falling to the Christians in 1485.

There I paid 4 Euros to wander around the totally over-the-top Santa Maria la Mayor church, built on the remains of a mosque, and retaining a mixture of Moorish, Renaissance and Gothic styles. Parts were rebuilt after an earthquake and others after a fire, and the result is an incredibly glitzy mish-mash of styles, with altars all over the place and a life-size waxwork-style modern statue of the Madonna and chums, complete with tears, which I absolutely loved.

We walked along to the bridge joining the old and new towns, sharing the nervousness of fellow tourists peering down into the chasm beneath, where red-billed chough were roosting on the rock-face.

On to the bullring, considered to be “the spiritual home of bullfighting”, where I had my photograph taken although I felt uncomfortable about the whole concept.

A 2k walk uphill back to the van, where we’d left Glen dozing comfortably on his chair in the cool, and I was happy to slump while David concoted a tapas-style dinner including some very nice, newly invented, salt and pepper mushrooms with garlic and cheese – must write down that recipe.