Three days in Ronda: where bullfighting got its rules, and Orson Welles chose to be buried
Two nights in the Serranía de Málaga: a bridge across a hundred metre gorge, the old Moorish quarter on the far side of it, a staircase cut down to the river, and one of the oldest bullrings in Spain.
- Length
- 3 days, 2 nights
- Where you stay
- Ronda
- Places
- 8 across 3 days
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Ronda is built on the edge of a cliff and then, remarkably, on the other side of it as well. A gorge called the Tajo cuts the plateau in two, a hundred metres deep and narrow enough to shout across, and the town's answer was to spend most of the eighteenth century building a bridge big enough to join the halves. The Puente Nuevo is the picture everybody has seen; standing on it is better than the picture.
The half on the south side is La Ciudad, the Moorish town, which held out until 1485 and still has its gates, its baths, its palaces and its lanes. The half on the north is El Mercadillo, built by the Christians afterwards on the flat ground, and it has the bullring, the park and the bars. Between them the cliff drops away to a valley of farms and, in the distance, the sierra.
Most people see this in four hours off a coach from the Costa del Sol. Two nights is the whole point: the town empties in the early evening, the light on the gorge goes orange, and the tapas bars fill with people who live here.
Highlights
- A bridge with a room inside the arch, hanging over a gorge you can hear the river in
- The ring where a Ronda man worked out how to fight bulls on foot, in 1785
- A staircase of two hundred steps cut down through the rock to the water
- Thirteenth century Moorish baths with star shaped holes in the vault throwing light on the floor
- A cliff top park where the ground simply stops and the valley starts
Where to stay
Ronda, two nights
Sleep in La Ciudad if you want quiet and views, in the Mercadillo if you want to be able to eat at ten without a walk. The two halves are three minutes apart across the bridge.
Two nights covers both sides properly and leaves an evening for doing nothing on a terrace, which in a town on a cliff edge is a legitimate activity.
Day by day
Day 1 in Ronda
The Puente Nuevo, the bullring and the Alameda
Walk to the bridge first. It was finished in 1793 after more than forty years of work and it replaced an earlier attempt that collapsed six years after it opened, taking about fifty people with it. There is a chamber built into the arch under the roadway, reached from the Mercadillo side, which has been a guardroom, a store and at times a prison.
Then the bullring, five minutes north. Ronda's is one of the oldest in Spain, a wide sandy circle of stone arcades built in 1785, and it is where Pedro Romero worked out the modern way of fighting on foot rather than from a horse. It is a museum for most of the year and you can walk out onto the sand.
End at the Alameda, the cliff top park behind the ring, where the balconies over the drop catch the last of the sun. From there it is a short walk back for dinner.
- 11:00
Puente Nuevo
ArchitectureRonda's bridge and the reason it is on every poster of Andalucía. Look at it from the parador terrace, then from the path that drops below it on the Mercadillo side, which is where the scale lands.
- 12:30
Plaza de Toros
OtherNeoclassical, arcaded and unusually beautiful for what it is, with a museum of the Romero family and the riding school of the Spanish cavalry attached.
- 19:00
Parque Alameda
NatureShaded walks that end in iron balconies bolted to the cliff, with the valley several hundred metres below. Sunset here, every evening, is what the town does.
With more time: Ronda's wine country starts at the edge of town, and the wine museum in a converted bodega near the bridge pours the local reds if you would rather taste than walk. Hemingway set the execution scene of For Whom the Bell Tolls in a town of this sort, and it is usually taken to be this one, which the bars will tell you about at length.
Day 2 in Ronda
La Ciudad: Santa María la Mayor, Mondragón and the water mine
Cross the bridge early and spend the day in the old town, which is small, walled and almost entirely quiet before ten and after six.
Start at the church on the main square, built on the site of the principal mosque after 1485 and finished more than two centuries later, so that it changes style as it goes. The arch of the mihrab and a piece of stuccoed wall survive behind the altarpiece, and the minaret is now the bell tower.
The Palacio de Mondragón, a couple of streets on, was the Moorish governor's house and later the Catholic monarchs' lodging, and its courtyards and terrace hang directly over the valley. In the afternoon, the water mine: a staircase cut inside the rock from a garden down to the river, dug so the town could reach water while under siege. It is more than two hundred steps and they are wet.
- 10:00
Iglesia de Santa Maria la Mayor
ReligiousRonda's main church, mosque underneath and two centuries of building on top, with a Renaissance nave, a baroque altarpiece and a gallery of arches facing the square.
- 11:30
Palacio de Mondragón
HistoricMudejar courtyards, a coffered ceiling and the best terrace in La Ciudad, with the town's museum of its own history in the rooms behind.
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- 14:00
Tapas in La Ciudad
EatLunch is late and small here. Order a couple of plates at a bar rather than a menu at a restaurant, and keep the afternoon light.
- 16:00
La Casa Del Rey Moro
VisitGardens on the cliff and the entrance to the water mine, a rough stair carved inside the cliff all the way to the river. Cool, dark, slippery and the best half hour in Ronda.
With more time: The Casa del Gigante, a restored fourteenth century Moorish house with horseshoe arches and carved ceilings, is two minutes from the church and takes twenty minutes. The Museo Lara nearby is a very large private collection of clocks, weapons and oddities, which is either your sort of thing or firmly not.
Day 3 in Ronda
The Arab baths and the old bridge
The bottom of the old town is the last thing and the easiest, because it is downhill. Follow the lanes below the Palacio del Marqués de Salvatierra to the two older bridges, where the gorge is shallow and the river runs at street level.
The baths are just across the water. They were built in the thirteenth century, when this was the entry to the town from the road, so that travellers washed before they came in, and they are among the best preserved in the country: brick vaults, horseshoe arches and star shaped vents that drop shapes of light onto the floor.
Then the climb back up, a coffee in the square and the road out.
- 10:00
Baños Árabes
OtherThree vaulted chambers, cold, warm and hot, with the hydraulic tower and the channel that fed them still standing outside. Fifteen minutes of explanation is worth having before you go in.
- 11:15
Puente Viejo
ArchitectureThe bridge that did the job before 1793, low over the river and a much better place to photograph the gorge from than the new one.
With more time: With a slower morning, the Puerta de Almocábar at the south end of the walls is a fifteen minute walk and you can climb onto the ramparts. The Barrio de San Francisco behind it is where the locals eat, and nobody with a coach to catch ever gets that far.
Before you go
Getting in
The train is the good way. Ronda is on the Algeciras line, with direct services from Málaga, Antequera, Granada, Córdoba and Madrid, and the last hour of the ride climbs through the mountains on a line the British built in the 1890s that is worth the fare on its own. The station is in the Mercadillo, twenty minutes on foot from the gorge or about seven euros in a taxi.
From Málaga the bus is more frequent than the train, takes about two hours and costs around ten euros. From Seville, buses take about two and a half hours. From Marbella, the mountain road A-376 covers forty three kilometres in an hour or so of hairpins, over a pass at more than eleven hundred metres where somebody has put up a monument to Rilke.
Do not plan to drive inside the old town. Parts of La Ciudad are closed to non residents, and there are underground car parks in the newer half.
Getting around
On foot, entirely. Everything below is inside a kilometre of the bridge, and the only real effort is the climb back up from the bottom of the gorge, which you will do at least once.
Wear something with a grip. The lanes in La Ciudad are polished stone and slope, and the path down into the Tajo is loose in places.
When to go
Spring and autumn. Ronda is high enough to be cooler than the coast in summer and colder than you expect in winter, when it can snow on the sierra behind the town.
The first weekend of September is Feria Goyesca, when the bullring is used for a fight in eighteenth century costume and the whole town dresses for it. Rooms go months ahead.
Any month, the difference between eleven in the morning and seven in the evening is the difference between queueing behind a tour guide's umbrella and having the bridge to yourself.
Ronda is a small town with one enormous piece of engineering in the middle of it and a Moorish quarter that the guidebooks treat as an afterthought. Give it two nights and the ratio reverses.
The last thing to do before the road out is to stand on the bridge once more, at about eight in the evening, when the birds are working the gorge and everybody else has gone.
Or make it a longer trip
These trips pass through here on the way somewhere else.
Make it your trip
Every stop, day and place here lands in your account as an editable trip. Move the days around, swap a city, add your own bookings and costs, and share it with whoever is coming.
Common questions
- Is Ronda worth staying in, or is a day trip enough?
- Stay. The day trip gets you the bridge and a crowded lunch. Two nights gets you the old town in the early morning, the gorge at sunset, and dinner at a price nobody on a coach pays.
- What is the best day trip from Ronda?
- Setenil de las Bodegas, half an hour away, where the houses are built into and under an overhanging cliff so that the rock is the roof of the street. The Roman town of Acinipo and the painted cave at La Pileta are the other two, and both need a car.
- Can I walk down into the gorge?
- Yes, and you should. A path drops from near the bridge on the Mercadillo side to the viewpoint underneath it, and the water mine takes you to the river from the other end. Both are steep and neither is long.
- Are there still bullfights?
- Only a few a year, the famous one being the Goyesca in early September. The rest of the time the ring is open as a museum, which is how most visitors see it.
- Is Ronda a good base for the white towns?
- It is the biggest of them and the best connected, so yes, if you have a car. Grazalema, Zahara and Olvera are all within an hour, and the drive between them is half the pleasure.
- Can I copy this itinerary and change it?
- Yes. Copy it, add a day for Setenil or the sierra, and shuffle the old town sights into whichever order suits where you are sleeping.