Day eight continued the Sierra arc with an early climb above Zahara, the reservoir below still and metallic in the morning light and the castle holding the ridge in quiet shadow, before the drive out of the village became a sequence of detours through the Grazalema mountains as storm closures forced us off the main passes and into narrower farm roads and unpaved cut-throughs. Then into Setenil de las Bodegas where the day shifted in tone as the village revealed itself beneath vast rock overhangs and entire streets ran under stone ceilings, turning lunch into something almost subterranean and quietly surreal; from there the road tightened again into the Serranía de Ronda, the landscape opening in folds of limestone and cork oak until the plateau finally split at the Tajo and Ronda appeared in fragments around the gorge, the Puente Nuevo spanning the void with improbable confidence. The afternoon unfolded through the old Moorish quarter, Arab baths and cliff-edge viewpoints before ending on the bridge at night, when the gorge fell into shadow and the city resolved into light and stone suspended above it.
Zahara: The Castle Above
The castle itself is not architecturally remarkable in isolation (the walls are ruined, the interior largely empty) but from the Torre del Homenaje at the highest point, 605 meters above sea level, the view is one of the most beautiful I encountered in the entire trip: the turquoise reservoir far below, the village's white roofs dropping away in terraces, the Sierra de Grazalema rising to the north and east in deep green folds, and on the clearest days (ours was clear) the distant plateau of the Ronda basin visible through a notch in the mountains.
We had driven into the Sierra de Grazalema the previous evening in golden light; we experienced it in the morning blue light as well, then off to the next destination. Several of the main passes through the sierra were still closed. Our original plan had included driving through Grazalema village itself, one of the iconic pueblos blancos perched at 823 meters, frequently cited as one of the wettest places in Spain and also one of the most beautiful. That road was blocked. We circled east instead, losing perhaps forty minutes to the detour but gaining a view of the sierra's eastern flank that we would otherwise have missed. At some point, the detour signs took us through private farms and hillsides, on dirt roads that required backing out or pulling aside every time another car was coming from the opposite direction.
With regret, I flagged Grazalema (and especially Tugate de los Cielos and Puerto de Las Palomas) for next time.
Setenil de las Bodegas: The Town That Lives Under a Rock
About an hour later, detours and all, the road descended from the sierra plateau and abruptly revealed something that defies the category of "white village". Setenil de las Bodegas is a white village in the literal sense. The houses are whitewashed, it appears in all the usual pueblo blanco lists, but it is architecturally unique in a way that has nothing to do with color or hilltop placement or Moorish street plans.
The town's houses are built under overhanging rock.
Not metaphorically. Not in a fanciful descriptive sense. Several entire streets of Setenil run beneath massive overhangs of limestone rock that extend outward from the gorge walls and form natural ceilings above the buildings. The houses have front walls (whitewashed, with windows and doors and flowerpots) but the rock is their ceiling, their back wall, and sometimes their side wall simultaneously. One very famous street, Cuevas del Sol (Caves of the Sun), is a full block of houses, bars, and restaurants with the rock overhead, their interiors the cool, humid, dimly lit spaces of actual caves that have been partitioned into rooms. On the other side of the narrow Río Guadalporcún, the mirror street Cuevas de la Sombra (Caves of the Shade) is even darker, the overhang lower, the quality of light deep inside more subterranean.
You cannot adequately prepare for the visual experience of Setenil de las Bodegas from photographs. They show you a street with unusual architecture and an interesting ceiling. What the photographs cannot convey is the spatial strangeness of standing in what your body recognizes as an outdoor street: sky visible at both ends, a breeze from the river, while looking up at solid rock a meter above your head. The cognitive dissonance is real and takes several minutes to resolve into the visual grammar of the place. After which you feel, gradually, at home.
The name carries its history. Setenil is thought to come from the Latin septem nihil (“seven times nothing”) a nod to its legendary resistance during the Reconquista. The Moors reportedly held the gorge against six Christian assaults over eight decades, only to fall on the seventh attempt in 1484 to Ferdinand and Isabella’s forces. Whether strictly true or not, the story is irresistible.
De las Bodegas ("of the wine cellars") refers to the post-Reconquista period, when Christian settlers moved in and found the natural caves ideal for storing wine, olives, and agricultural products. Vineyards were planted and flourished until the phylloxera epidemic of the 1880s wiped out most of the European wine industry, including Setenil's. The name survived the vineyards by more than a century.
Walking through the town proceeds in layers. The lower streets along the river are the ones with the rock overhangs, the famous streets that have made Setenil one of the most-photographed places in inland Andalucía. Above them, the town opens up to more conventional white village territory: cobbled lanes, flower-hung balconies, the 15th-century Iglesia de Nuestra Señora de la Encarnación (Gothic-Renaissance, built by Ferdinand and Isabella as a victory monument), the Nasrid castle ruins at the very top of the hill. Forty towers once ringed this castle; one remains, and the views from it look down over the rock overhangs below with a perspective that finally makes the geological structure comprehensible. You can see from above how the gorge has eroded the valley sides into these extraordinary cantilevers, leaving the rock hanging over the river like a series of massive stone shelves.
We sat under one of those stone shelves at Bar Frasquito, a small tapas bar on Cuevas del Sol with plastic chairs on the pavement and a menu written on a chalkboard. The rock ceiling was roughly two meters above the tables. More jamón. The tortilla arrived warm and correctly dense. Not the rubbery, eggy disk that passes for tortilla in tourist-facing establishments, but the real thing, potato and egg cooked through with patience until the interior is almost custardy. A cold beer. The sound of the river to the right. The cool stone above us. Touristy or not, worth a stop. Especially since it’s a short distance from Ronda, another must-do destination.
The Road to Ronda
The drive from Setenil to Ronda is only eighteen kilometers. The approach from the west reveals the city incrementally: first, the plateau edge appears, then the houses of the mercadillo (new town) at the precipice, and finally, as the road curves and you understand why the city exists at this particular point of the plateau: the Tajo de Ronda, a 120-meter-deep gorge, narrow as a knife wound, with the Guadalevín River visible as a thin silver thread far, far below. Connecting the old town on one side to the new on the other: the Puente Nuevo.
We booked a room for the night at Hotel Maestranza (a tad overpriced, but you pay for the location and we appreciated the on-site parking), unpacked, and quickly set about exploring, starting with the old bullring, literally across the street.
The Bullring: Pedro Romero and the Goyesca - tradition, controversy, history
In a long list of “firsts” for this trip we visited the bullring. One of the oldest in Spain. The Plaza de Toros de la Real Maestranza de Ronda, completed in 1785, a marvel of neoclassical elegance, built of local sandstone with 136 tuscan columns supporting covered seating for around five thousand spectators. Originally conceived as the official seat of the noble Real Maestranza de Caballería (a cavalry order that trained with bulls) the arena later adapted to modern bullfighting. Pedro Romero, who fought in the inaugural corrida and is said to have killed nearly six thousand bulls without serious injury, essentially invented the form of bullfighting still practiced today. Two centuries later, Antonio Ordóñez, Hemingway’s friend and founder of the Corrida Goyesca, carried on Ronda’s tradition of technical precision and cool under pressure. Both have statues outside the ring, though a cheerful local sign notes that neither is Romero; an inside joke that has been amusing visitors for generations.
Unlike those who are either squeamish or see bullfighting purely as cruelty, I would have liked to experience a corrida. Perhaps next time. To its defenders, it’s an art form, deeply embedded in the culture and traditions of this region. To others, it’s animal cruelty. Growing up in a rural, truly farm-to-table setting in Romania, I’ve had my own early exposure to what we now call “cruelty to animals”. There, the tradition was to “sacrifice” a pig for Christmas or a lamb for Easter, often in improvised, backyard conditions. As children, we watched it all with a kind of curiosity and fascinated excitement: the killing, the butchering, the transformation from animal to meal. Even something as mundane as chicken meal meant seeing the head cleanly severed, the body briefly animated, "running around like”... you know…(yes, I experienced the visual spectacle of it long before I knew the idiom even existed). Call it desensitization, perhaps, but it was simply normal for us. Tradition, if you will.
Bullfighting, of course, has been abolished in much of Spain, but not everywhere, and certainly not across parts of Andalucía. Spain is old, and complicated, and part of what makes travel here compelling is the encounter with practices that predate the ethical frameworks we arrive with. Understanding something and endorsing it are not the same thing.
Ronda: The Old Town and the New Bridge
A mere couple hundred meters from the Bullring: the bridge and the old town. Ronda divides itself neatly between the modern town on one side of the gorge and La Ciudad, the old town, on the other. The bridge connects them. Most of the serious history is in La Ciudad.
The old town was a Moorish city for seven centuries: Medina Runda, a city of importance in the Taifa period and subsequently in the Nasrid kingdom, thoroughly Islamicized in its layout and character, its water management, its urban logic. Ferdinand and Isabella took it in 1485, a year before Zahara, and began the usual program of conversion: mosques into churches, medina into cathedral plaza, Arabic place names into Castilian ones. The Arab Baños Árabes survived this conversion largely intact. The 13th-century hammam, still structurally complete, with their characteristic star-shaped skylights and cold-warm-hot sequence of pools, is among the best-preserved in Andalucía. The Palacio de Mondragón (14th century, Nasrid origin, subsequently modified by Ferdinand and Isabella who used it as a residence) now houses the Ronda municipal museum and is worth entering for the garden, a series of terraced patios with views over the gorge edge. The Casa del Rey Moro (House of the Moorish King), one of the more atmospheric of the old town's buildings, has gardens descending directly to the gorge floor via a spectacular 231-step stairway cut into the rock. In Moorish times, Christian slaves carried water from the river to the city above. It can be visited, for a price.
We did the old town walk: the Mondragón palace garden (gorge view superlative), the Arab Baths, the city walls at the cliff edge, the small church of Santa María la Mayor built on the site of the main mosque. Then across the bridge. A pedestrian experience at close range, the gorge yawning directly below your feet through the stone railings, the wind always slightly unpredictable at this altitude.
The Puente Nuevo is probably the most photographed human-made structure in Spain. Standing at the edge of the Tajo and looking at the bridge, you understand why people photograph it over and over from all possible angles. It is a 98-meter-high three-arch stone bridge completed in 1793 after 34 years of construction, spanning 66 meters across a gorge that is, at its narrowest, only 68 meters wide. The scale is startling in a way that photographs, for once, actually preserve: the bridge is genuinely enormous relative to the gorge it crosses, and the gorge is genuinely vertiginous relative to the city growing from its edges. The combination produces a view that activates the part of the brain responsible for processing implausibility.
The bridge’s history reads like a novel, a fitting backdrop for Hemingway. The first attempt in 1741 collapsed, killing fifty people. Work resumed in 1759 under Domingo Lois de Monteagudo, who spent nineteen years on the lower third before leaving the project. In 1785, José Martín de Aldehuela, already one of Andalucía’s defining architects, completed it with a daring three-arch design on the old foundations.
We walked down on either side of the bridge. Nothing all that impressive on the East side, unless you’re into Arab baths relics. But the Old Bridge (or Puente de las Curtidurías) offers a nice/different viewpoint.
On the other side, however, walk to Plaza de Maria Auxiliadora, and from there, down the winding path to the bottom of the gorge. Amazing views and much fewer tourists venturing down that way. But definitely worth it for the vantage point.
After the climb back up, a quick stop at El Campillo, then back across the bridge for a quick stroll around Alameda del Tajo (fantastic panoramic views of the valley below).
A late siesta at the hotel, then dinner at Taberna Quinto Tramo: a welcome creative detour from traditional tapas, with bao buns, chicharrón, Korean-influenced combinations, and smoked salmon montaditos. After dinner, we crossed Puente Nuevo again. By late evening, the day-trippers were gone. The bridge belonged to us, glowing under the stars. The gorge below was pitch black, the city lights shimmering on either side, the bridge illuminated from beneath. Somewhere far down, the Guadalevín whispered over its stones.
Practical Notes: Day 8
Morning departure from Zahara: The Grazalema Natural Park roads (especially the Puerto de las Palomas and the direct road through Grazalema village) are subject to closure during and after severe weather. Check road conditions at the Sierra de Grazalema visitor center website before planning your route. An alternative eastern approach via Olvera and Alcalá del Valle adds 30–40 minutes but stays on major roads.
Setenil de las Bodegas: Park at the lower village entrance on Avenida del Carmen (free). Walk into the gorge to reach Cuevas del Sol and Cuevas de la Sombra. The famous rock streets are 5 minutes from the car park. Bar Frasquito (Cuevas del Sol) is the classic local tapas stop; La Herrería and the deli La Cueva del Ibérico (Cuevas de la Sombra) are also worth stopping at. Budget 1.5–2 hours for a thorough wander including the castle climb. The town gets busy with day-trippers by 11am from Ronda; arrive before 10am if possible.
Drive from Setenil to Ronda: 18 km, approximately 25 minutes via A-374 and MA-7402. The approach from the west gives the first bridge views.
Ronda: Park in the car parks near the bullring or north of the Puente Nuevo (both signposted). The old town and all major sights are walkable within 30 minutes of each other.
Puente Nuevo Interpretation Centre: Small museum inside the bridge chamber, €2.50, open Monday to Friday 10am–6pm (summer 10am–7pm), weekends 10am–3pm. Worth it for the gorge views from inside the bridge and the history exhibits.
Arab Baths (Baños Árabes): One of the best-preserved in Andalucía. Small entrance fee, open Tuesday–Sunday. Go early for the best light through the star-shaped skylights.
Palacio de Mondragón: Municipal museum with gorge-edge gardens. The garden terrace view is the highlight.
Plaza de Toros Museum: Entry approximately €9 including audioguide; €14 for guided tour option. Allow 45-60 minutes. The ring itself, at walking level, is worth experiencing for the scale and the architectural quality. Even if bullfighting isn't your thing, the museum is legitimate cultural history.
Parador terrace: Open to non-guests for drinks. The late afternoon gorge view from the terrace is one of the finest in Ronda. Go around 6pm for the best light.
Dinner in Ronda: Restaurante Almocábar (Ruedo Alameda 5, old town) is excellent and focused on local sierra ingredients; book ahead. Bardal (two Michelin stars) is the city's fine dining destination if that's your register; book weeks ahead. Tragatapas (Calle Nueva 4) is a popular tapas option, younger crowd, good quality-to-price ratio. Pedro Romero and Casa de la Vid near the bullring are reliable for traditional Ronda cooking.
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