Day nine delivered one of the most dramatic transitions of the trip, moving from mountain gorge to imperial city. Starting with the Caminito del Rey, where a narrow wooden walkway clings to the sheer walls of a limestone gorge a hundred meters above the turquoise reservoir, turning what was once one of Spain’s most dangerous paths into a controlled, suspended walk through scale and silence, continuing with a detour up to Castillo de Almodóvar del Río, a fully intact hilltop fortress known to many as “Highgarden,” rising above the Guadalquivir plain with its towers and battlements set against an endless sea of olive groves, before the final drive east brought us into Córdoba in the late afternoon, crossing the Roman bridge into a city that once rivaled Constantinople in size and sophistication, and ending the day in the Judería at dusk, where narrow white lanes, flowered walls, and the distant presence of the Mezquita signaled the shift from landscape travel to layered urban history, just in time for dinner and the calm before entering one of Andalusia’s great monuments the next morning.
El Caminito del Rey
The Caminito del Rey, (El Rey being King Alfonso XIII, who walked this path in 1921 to inaugurate the Conde del Guadalhorce dam), is a 3-kilometer elevated walkway bolted to the limestone walls of the Desfiladero de los Gaitanes (Gaitanes Gorge). A gorge formed over millions of years by the Guadalhorce River eating through limestone, with the resulting chasm roughly 200 meters high and, in places, barely 10 meters wide.
The path was built between 1901 and 1905 to give workers access between two hydroelectric plants at opposite ends of the gorge. Given the cliff geometry, the builders couldn't simply walk along the riverbed; they had to pin the walkway to the vertical rock face itself. The original workers were, sailors from Málaga, experienced in working at height from rigging. Men who thought nothing of hanging from ropes while they drove steel stanchions into sheer limestone.
For roughly a century the path served its industrial purpose, then declined as the plants became automated and maintenance budget went elsewhere. By the 1990s it had deteriorated to the point of genuine danger: concrete sections had crumbled into the gorge, leaving gaps bridged only by the original steel support beams, no handrails for long stretches, the safety wire along the length frayed to questionable reliability. Adrenaline tourists and rock climbers who frequented the gorge kept hiking it anyway, which produced the inevitable results: five deaths between 1999 and 2000 alone. The government closed the access points. This did not entirely stop people from accessing it, because the kind of person who hikes this type of scenery doesn't recalibrate their risk assessment because an access point was removed.
After years of debate, in 2011 the government agreed to fund a €9 million restoration. The project took four years; the path reopened in March 2015 to considerable international attention. Lonely Planet named it one of the best new attractions. The original concrete and steel has been supplemented by wooden boardwalk sections with a simple wire guardrail, the critical suspended footbridge near the end is reinforced and properly anchored, and helmets are mandatory. The path's reputation as the world's most dangerous walkway has been duly addressed.
The experience: We arrived at the Visitor Center parking (there is also a train from Málaga), took the shuttle bus to the northern entrance at El Kiosko, were fitted with hard hats, and began. The access path through pine forest to the official gorge entrance is pleasant and unremarkable. Then the gorge opens, the path narrows, and you are walking on a wooden boardwalk with a limestone wall to your right and, to your left, nothing: the gorge falling away steeply to the turquoise reservoir far below, the opposite gorge wall rising steeply from the water.
The gorge section is where the experience earns its reputation. The scale of the limestone walls is hard to convey in photographs. You are enclosed in a slot that is simultaneously enormous and intimate, the rock close enough to touch on both sides, the sky a thin stripe of blue far above. The wooden walkway is completely secure, but the experience is not entirely comfortable for anyone who doesn't love heights. Your brain will put you on alert regardless of what the signage tells it about engineering tolerances.
The glass-bottomed viewing platform that extends from the walkway at one point, cantilevered out from the cliff face, is where a lot of people stand firmly at the entrance and decline to proceed. This is not weakness. It is an entirely reasonable response to being asked to stand on a glass floor suspended 100 meters above a gorge and look straight down.
The old aqueduct bridge, a stone arch spanning the gorge from wall to wall, original infrastructure from 1905, still intact, is visible from the walkway and is one of the most striking images of the whole route: two walls of limestone with this engineering artifact stretched between them, simultaneously massive and delicate-seeming at this height. Just past it, the Puente del Rey, the modern suspension footbridge that crosses the gorge at full width, swings very gently in the breeze as you cross it.
The entire gorge section takes roughly 30-45 minutes at a moderate pace; add the approach from El Kiosko and the exit to El Chorro station and the total is a couple of hours. The shuttle bus returns you to the northern entrance if you arrive by car.
Booking: Tickets are timed entry, limited to 300 per hour, and sell out in advance, especially for weekends from April through October. Book at www.caminitodelrey.info as soon as your dates are confirmed. Annual capacity is approximately 300,000 visitors and is regularly reached. Do not assume you can walk up and buy tickets on the day. Shuttles run every 30 mins or so. We bought “guided” tickets (self-guided were not available at the early hour) but told them we didn’t need a guide, and after a very brief set of instructions, they waived us on.
The Game of Thrones Castle Detour
Only about 30 minutes from Córdoba, just a quick detour from A-4, the Castillo de Almodóvar del Río rises into view atop the hill. It is not a ruined set of walls, but an intact, towered, battlemented, medievally complete fortress on a hill, the kind of silhouette that we recall from fairy tales. Eight towers, crenellated walls, a hillside of approach, olive trees descending to the river below. Against a clear spring sky, it looks exactly like what it is: one of the finest preserved medieval castles in Andalucía, and, for viewers of a certain HBO series, the ancestral home of House Tyrell.
In one of the Game of Thrones episodes Jamie Lannister marches on Highgarden. The scenes of the army arriving and the subsequent confrontation between Jamie and Lady Olenna Tyrell were filmed here, the castle serving as the external facade and towers of Highgarden. The dungeons were separately used to represent portions of Casterly Rock. The admission price offers a map locating specific filming positions and a small exhibition of costume replicas from the show.
The castle’s real history is more compelling than its fictional one. Built by the Moors around 760 AD on a Roman castrum, it guarded the Guadalquivir corridor, visible for miles and linked by watchtowers across the valley. It passed to the Christians after Ferdinand III took Córdoba in 1236, then slipped into ruin over the centuries. In the early 20th century, the 12th Count of Torralva, Rafael Desmaissiéres, undertook a 35-year restoration, completing it in the 1930s. Still privately owned, it remains in the same family.
From the tower top, the view over the Guadalquivir valley is extraordinary: the river curves below, the city of Almodóvar del Río visible at the base of the hill, the flat agricultural plain extending east toward Córdoba, the Sierra Morena rising to the north. It is exactly the kind of view that medieval castle-builders sought, and it is exactly the kind of view that HBO location scouts identified and decided required minimal modification to serve as the seat of one of the most powerful houses in Westeros.
We spent an hour. The admission is modest (around €8). It fit cleanly between the Caminito and Córdoba as a stop that genuinely earns its place rather than existing purely to extend the day. It can also fit as a stop if driving from Córdoba to Seville. Worth the stop, worth the climb, worth the Instagram post with the obligatory "winter is coming" caption.
And another potential addition right outside Córdoba (in case you have not had your history fill by now and have another hour or two to spare): Medina Azahara, the archeological remains of a 10th-century Umayyad palace-city built by Caliph Abd al-Rahman III just outside Córdoba, intended as a dazzling seat of power, and abandoned less than a century later after civil war.
Córdoba: First Impressions, Evening
The road into Córdoba from the west follows the Guadalquivir, and the city reveals itself across the river: the Torre de la Calahorra on the southern bank, the Puente Romano spanning the water, and beyond it the old city rising in white and terracotta and, above everything, the minaret-turned-bell-tower of the Mezquita-Catedral, the Great Mosque of Córdoba, now technically a Catholic cathedral, standing at the centre of what was once the most important Islamic city in Western Europe.
Córdoba's importance cannot be overstated within the context of Andalucía's history. At its 10th-century peak, the city was the capital of the Umayyad Caliphate of Córdoba and the largest city in Western Europe. A city with a population estimated between 300,000 and 500,000, vastly exceeding contemporary Paris and London, which were medieval market towns by comparison. It was home to over 300 mosques, 50 hospitals, 80 public schools, and street lighting when Paris and London were candlelit and muddy. The Convivencia, (the coexistence of Muslim, Jewish, and Christian communities in Al-Andalus) was not, as is sometimes romanticized, a multicultural utopia without tension; it was a complex, often strained relationship, with periods of genuine cooperation and periods of serious persecution. But it produced a civilization that preserved and advanced knowledge at a time when much of the rest of Europe was, culturally speaking, considerably less sophisticated.
That civilization ended in 1236 when Ferdinand III's forces took the city. The Great Mosque became a cathedral. The Jewish quarter survived, its synagogue one of only three preserved medieval synagogues in Spain. The palaces and gardens of Medina Azahara (the one I mentioned a couple paragraphs above) were reduced to ruins by Berber mercenaries in 1010, then buried under centuries of soil until excavations began in the 20th century. What remains, across the old city, the Judería, and the Mezquita itself, is a palimpsest: layer on layer on layer, each new civilization building on or through the previous one.
We parked in an unpaved lot in front of our rented apartment, no more than 300 meters from the Roman Bridge. Convenient, location-wise, but one of the less desirable rentals we had in this trip thus far. Car remained there for the duration, since driving into the Judería is technically impossible and practically insane, the streets being narrow and tourist-dense.
The evening program: walk the Judería, find dinner, save the Mezquita for the morning. This is the correct sequence. The Mezquita deserves a fresh mind and good light, and the evening in the Judería is an experience in its own right.
The Judería at Dusk
The Roman bridge first. Originally built in the 1st century BC as the main Roman crossing over the Guadalquivir, anchoring the city’s importance along the Via Augusta; later reshaped under Islamic rule and restored over centuries. Its 16 arches now carry only pedestrians, offering one of the most atmospheric approaches to the Mezquita, especially at sunset when the stone glows and the river moves slowly beneath.
We quickly made our way across the bridge and into the labyrinth of streets of La Juderia. Busy. Touristy. Hordes of tour groups. Souvenir shops that were all selling the same trinkets. We booked a table at Casa Pepe and explored a bit. Walked by the Alcazar of the Christian Monarchs. Both the palace and the gardens have been closed for renovations, unfortunately. And although regrettable, I doubt they would have surpassed what we saw at Alhambra, or - later on - at the Royal Alcazar in Seville. Also of note, Patios Córdobeses are also “a thing” but it was too early in the year for anything considerable in full bloom.
The Judería (Córdoba's medieval Jewish quarter) is a maze of narrow lanes, whitewashed walls, flower-hung balconies, and sudden small courtyards opening from invisible gateways. Unlike many "historic quarters" that have been so thoroughly converted to tourism that their authentic character has leaked away, the Judería still feels like a place that exists for people who live there as well as for people passing through (especially the further you venture out from the vicinity of the Mezquita). Residents emerge from doors. Cats occupy strategic positions on walls. The lanes turn at angles that make no modern planning sense and make perfect medieval sense. The sound of the city outside, the car noise, the tourist-strip energy, disappears inside it, replaced by footsteps on old stone and the occasional burst of conversation from a window.
The Calleja de las Flores (Lane of the Flowers) is the most photographed alley in Córdoba: a narrow white lane framing the Mezquita tower at the far end, the walls covered in terracotta pots of red and pink geraniums at the height of the tourist season (we were slightly early for full flower, but the framing was still extraordinary). It is worth seeing and worth mentioning that approximately fourteen other people will be photographing it simultaneously if you arrive at any hour after 9am.
The Córdoba Synagogue (Calle Judíos), one of only three surviving medieval synagogues in Spain, built in 1315 and now functioning as a museum. Is worth the small entry fee for the extraordinary 14th-century Mudéjar stucco decoration that covers its walls: geometric and floral patterns rendered in a style that reflects the hybrid culture of the period, a Jewish house of worship built by craftsmen working in an Arabic decorative tradition in a city recently returned to Christian control. The neighborhood around it was once the Jewish quarter proper.
Later on, dinner at the famed Casa Pepe. Michelin Guide level. Seated inside the patio. Excellent service. Amazing food and great wine. The Almorejo was yummy. The Mazamorra (that cold soup made with almonds I mentioned earlier) was gastronomic silk. And I just had to try another local specialty: rabo de toro (oxtail) slow braised in red wine and vegetables. Oh, my God! An extremely flavorful, gelatinous concoction. And heavy. Very heavy. Hit me “like a brick” later on. But no regrets. Most of it was self-inflicted, as I could not let myself not finish it all (and lick the plate!)
After dinner, we walked back through the Judería in the dark, the limestone walls lit from below, the lanes completely quiet. Tomorrow: the Mezquita.
Practical Notes: Day 9
Caminito del Rey: Tickets must be booked in advance at www.caminitodelrey.info. Timed entry, maximum 300 per hour. The path runs south (from Ardales/El Kiosko) to north (El Chorro station); you need to either park at El Kiosko and take the shuttle back at the end, or park at El Chorro and take the shuttle to El Kiosko at the beginning. The Visitor Center also has central parking. Shuttle bus runs every 30 minutes, between 7:40am and 7pm. Minimum age 8; helmets mandatory (provided); closed shoes required; no loose bags. Allow 3-4 hours total including access path, gorge section, and exit. The walk is safe and well-managed; the reputational echo of its previous incarnation should not discourage reasonably fit, non-acrophobic visitors. Those with serious fear of heights should be honest with themselves. The gorge section is genuinely exposed, the glass balcony is optional, and there is no shame in finding this particular activity incompatible with your nervous system.
Almodóvar castle: 25km west of Córdoba on the A-431, following the south bank of the Guadalquivir. Weekend access is on foot only from the car park at the hill's base (weekday car access to the castle entrance). Entry about €8. Monday–Friday 11am–2:30pm and 4–7pm; weekends 11am–7pm. Allow 60–90 minutes. The Game of Thrones tour map is included with entry; the tower views over the valley are outstanding.
Driving to Córdoba: From Almodóvar, 25 minutes east on the A-431 to the city. Park in the large garage at Paseo de la Victoria near the Alcázar (well-signposted, affordable). Do not attempt to park inside the Judería or old city center.
Judería evening walk: Free. The Calleja de las Flores is best before 9am or after 6pm. The synagogue (Calle Judíos 20) is open Tuesday–Saturday 9am–3pm, closed Sunday afternoon and Monday. Small entry fee. The bronze Maimonides statue outside the synagogue is on Calle Judíos; rub the foot if superstition is your thing.
Dinner in the Judería: Bodegas Mezquita (Calle Céspedes 12) is reliable and serves excellent Córdoban classics. Casa Mazal (Calle Tomás Conde 3) is the city's only Sephardic restaurant and worth booking for a unique experience. Taberna Salinas (Calle Tundidores 3) is a Córdoba institution since 1879, old-school atmosphere, good rabo de toro. Order salmorejo at all of them; Córdoba's version is categorically better than anywhere else and should be ordered twice. Other notable restaurants: Taberna los Pedroches, Casa de Manolete, La Montillana, Casa El Pisto, La Fuenseca, Patio de la Juderia (stopped for a drink), El Rincon de Carmen, the list goes on and on…
For Mezquita: Buy tickets online before your visit (€15 general entry at time of writing; book at www.mezquita-catedraldecordoba.es). The free morning entry window (8:30–9:30am, Monday to Saturday) is genuinely free but crowds form early and you cannot book it; arrive by 8:15 to have a reasonable chance. General admission from 10am is the more reliable option. Allow 90 minutes minimum inside; bring a scarf or jacket for the dress code (shoulders and knees covered).
