Ronda is split in two by a gorge. The Tajo — which older accounts never name — is about 120 metres deep and was cut by the Guadalevín, and the Puente Nuevo spans it in a single arch.
It is the best known of the white towns and the easiest to reach from the coast, which makes it the busiest. It is still worth the trip, and much better after the coaches have gone.
Correctly the Puente Nuevo — frequently misspelt "Puento" — and it took forty-odd years to build, completed in 1793 to José Martín de Aldehuela's design.
Older accounts put it in the reign of Felipe V, which cannot be right: he died in 1746, nearly half a century before the bridge was finished. The king on the throne at its completion was Carlos IV.
There is a chamber in the central pier, reached from the gorge side, which has served as a guardroom and a prison and now holds a small interpretation centre. The view of the bridge is not from the bridge: it is from the Camino de los Molinos, the path that drops into the gorge from the Plaza de María Auxiliadora, and that walk back up is the price of the photograph.
Two older bridges cross the Tajo downstream — the Puente Viejo, rebuilt in 1616, and the single-span Moorish Puente Árabe beside the Arab baths.
South of the bridge is La Ciudad, the Moorish town, and almost everything historic is in it.
The Plaza de Toros de la Real Maestranza was built in 1785, also by Aldehuela, and it is unusual: a double arcade of stone columns rather than the usual tiers, and a very wide ring.
It is often described as the oldest bullring in Spain. That claim is contested — Seville's Maestranza and the ring at Béjar both have older elements — so "one of the oldest, and the oldest of this design" is as far as it can safely be taken. It is open to visitors as a monument and museum on days when nothing is on, which is most days; the one annual corrida goyesca in September is the exception.
Older accounts say a King Alfonso drove the Moors out. Ronda fell in May 1485, to the armies of Ferdinand and Isabella, after artillery bombardment cut the town off from its water. That was seven years before Granada, and it mattered because Ronda had been thought impregnable.
Ronda collects writers. Rilke stayed here in the winter of 1912 and wrote about it; Hemingway used the place and the bullring. The concrete fact is Orson Welles, whose ashes were interred on 7 May 1987 at a farm belonging to his friend the bullfighter Antonio Ordóñez, outside the town. The site is on private land.
Older accounts send visitors from Ronda to the Pinsapar fir forest and the Garganta Verde gorge as if they were local walks. They are neither: both are in the Sierra de Grazalema, which is in Cadiz province, over the boundary from Ronda's own Malaga. They are an hour's drive away and several of the routes need a free permit arranged in advance.
Ronda's own country is the Serranía de Ronda, and the walks that start from the town are the gorge path, the old Arab bridge circuit and the hills to the north. The Cueva de la Pileta, with Palaeolithic paintings, is about twenty kilometres west and is still shown by the family who found it, by lamplight, in small groups.
Ronda is reached by a slow and spectacular railway from Algeciras and by road from the coast — about an hour and a half from Malaga, less from Marbella, on roads that climb steeply. It is on no high-speed line and never will be. General practicalities for the region are on the Andalucia page.