Ronda Things to Do

4 more images

The Puente Nuevo is Ronda's icon. People come from all around the world to see this awesome sight. The canyon walls are around 100 metres high and the bridge straddles over the top. From here the views over the valley both sides are stunning! No wonder it is so popular!

Check out my travelogue for more pix.

1 more image

Puente Nuevo is a magnificent struture built between 1759 and 1793. a previous bridge having collapsed in 1741, killing 50 people.

2 more images

Ronda's other river, the Rio Guadalevin, is very short in length, rising in the hills behind Ronda and finishing as a tributary of the Rio Guadiaro after flowing only a relatively short distance. However, the dramatic way it makes this journey is what has made Ronda the 3rd most popular tourist destination in Andalusia, displacing Cordoba and with only Sevilla and Granada drawing more visitors.

Ronda is actually perched on a huge chunk of peridotite, the type of solidified lava immediately above the molten core of the planet. Under the world's oceans, the layer of peridotite is roughly 100 km thick, with only about 6 km of other rock types layered above it. Ronda is one of the places where, as the continents bumped into each other millions of years ago, a chunk of oceanic periodite was forced to the surface as the continental plates battled each other. Peridotite is about mid-point on the rock hardness scale, making it harder than iron. Always nice to know you are standing on the edge of something solid!

Over the centuries the Rio Guadalevin has cut its way down through this rock layer, creating the 120-m deep El Tajo gorge as gravity forces it to flow toward the Rio Guadiaro valley below. With the city cut in two by this narrow but deep gash, over a long time span three bridges have been built to connect the two halves - Puente Romano, then Puente Viejo and finally Puente Nuevo.

The depth of the gorge was awe-inspiring as we first looked down as well as out from Puente Nuevo toward the distant broad valley. The 2nd photo is basically the same view but up and to the left a bit, showing the wall of the gorge leading to our eventual 'lookout' point by Plaza del Campillo over there somewhere. The 3rd photo was taken after we crossed the road to the other side of the bridge to look inland, and shows a much narrower gorge as the river winds its way into and through Ronda from the distant hills.

2 more images

In early afternoon, following the museum visit, we took a walk along Calle Tenorio which is the first street to your right after crossing Puente Nuevo from New Ronda. It runs along the edge of the escarpment above the river valley and has a wall of hotels with their fancy restaurants lining the edge of the drop-off. Sample menus are posted streetside and the various entrance doors were open, allowing passing pedestrians to see straight through the hotels to the tables set up outside on the edge of the cliff. Very tempting but also very expensive judging from the menus.

Our walk ended at the pleasant Plaza del Campillo, one of the few open spaces on the edge of the gorge that is accessable to wandering tourists. It has fantastic balconies that overlook the river valley as well as a set of steps that zigzag down to the valley floor below in case you want to see Ronda from a completely different perspective. The ruins of old flour mills can be seen below and it is possible to double back to Puente Nuevo while in the depths to see what it looks like from below, but we were starting to run out of time by then and it looked like quite a hike! The 2nd photo shows the line of hotels with the distant path zigzaging downward from the Plaza. The 3rd photo was taken beside the iron fence at Plaza Campillo looking back toward Puente Nuevo.

3 more images

As far as man-made attractions go in Ronda, Puente Nuevo wins hands-down! You probably need a full day to properly explore this amazing structure from above, inside and below - as well as from various distant viewpoints.

With Ronda growing rapidly in the late 1500s and through the 1600s, it became necessary to span the El Tajo gorge with a larger and more convenient bridge than the older ones then in use. Success was partially achieved in 1734 when a single-arch bridge was ordered by King Philip V, to provide access from Old Ronda to the valuable building land on the other side of the gorge. However, the bridge collapsed in 1741 while still under construction, killing fifty people.

There was no turning back by then, so plans for a second attempt to bridge the 68-m wide and 120-m deep gorge at this location were started in 1751. Using a system of pulleys, large quarried stones from the bottom of the gorge were hoisted up one by one to begin the first stage of the project - building the foundation and the first smaller arch over the river and, on top of that, the huge second arch that brought the bridge height to 90 m. This was no quick project, with the original architect no longer involved by 1778 and the project coming to a stop for a short period. However, work finally resumed on the final stage of building the two upper arches as well as a room just under the roadway (presently a museum with the small window you can see above the main arch). With a height of almost 100-m above the gorge, Puente Nuevo was finally completed in 1793, fifty-two years after the last bridge had collapsed!

The 2nd photo gives a good overall view of the three layers of the bridge's construction, including the tall arch that took so long to build. The actual road across the bridge remains cobbled to this day (3rd photo) and there are stone seats and look-out platforms built into the sides of the bridge - great places to linger a bit for awe-inspiring views up and down the El Tajo gorge in either direction! Later in the day, the sun came out in full force with the 4th photo giving a view of the bridge from a distant lookout area as we faced both the bridge and the Parador hotel.

2 more images

I can't really say that we had to fight our way through throngs of tourists while exploring Ronda on Christmas Day! Overall, it was a very pleasant experience as most people must have been home celebrating the holiday, judging from the empty streets.

It made for quite a relaxing stroll on the side streets as we just wandered along in the sunshine taking in the sights and the Moorish/Spanish architecture of the various buildings we came across. Our little day-trip to Ronda had turned out very well in the end and we capped it off with an excellent evening meal on the Mediterranean coast when we returned to Estepona. It was the same thing there, we were their only customers and they shut the restaurant down when we left! Merry Christmas to all.

During the course of our wanderings in La Ciudad we chanced upon Lara's Museum, located on the left of the main street through Ronda when walking from Puente Nuevo toward the older part of the city. We had no idea of what was inside, but it appeared to be interesting and, for the price of 2-3 Euros it looked like it was worth a try!

It turned out that this museum is a relatively new addition to Ronda's attractions, being a project of the owner of the local bus company to display various artifacts he had collected over the years depicting local customs and life-styles. It has an eclectic mixture of things such as archeological finds, bullfighting equipment, 17th Century weapons, antique clocks, various types of old armaments, torture implements from the Inquisition, early cameras and archaeological exhibits to name but a few of the displays. The museum is interesting but not something a person would lose any sleep over if missed.

However, depending on your timing, if it is anything like the one we saw while in Granada, you might enjoy a traditional Flamenco show which are performed on the lower levels of the museum on Thursday to Saturday evenings.

1 more image

The presence of pre-historic stone dolmens not far from Ronda (not to mention the Roman era's nearby city of Acinipo) provides evidence that this part of the world has a long history of human habitation. However, present-day Ronda is largely the result of settlement on these dramatic cliffs during the almost 800-year period of Moorish occupation between 711 and 1492, with Ronda itself falling to Christian forces in 1485 as the Moors were gradually pushed back across the Strait of Gibraltar.

Under the new Christian rulers, Ronda gradually grew in importance, so much so that the old Roman Bridge (locally known as Puente Roman) and the present-day Old Bridge (or Puente Arabe) built by the Moors and seen far below in the 2nd photo, had to be supplemented with the much larger Puente Nuevo. We were standing on the New Bridge when we took these views of Old Ronda where, today, the Roman bridge is for pedestrians only while the Old Bridge handles local traffic.