After my day at the Alhambra, I had 2 days left in Spain before my early flight out of Madrid. The drive north from Granada to Madrid would have taken about 6 hours and there were plenty of beautiful cities to see along the way – Sevilla, Cordoba and Toledo, for instance – but in my infinite wisdom I decided to go further south to visit Ronda, one of the Andalucia white hill towns, thus ensuring that my last day in Spain would be all driving.

Sometimes I’m not very bright.

Why would I do such a thing? Well, the romantic promise of an Andalucia white hill town grabbed me and the guidebook promised a beautiful hilly little city that was quiet and peaceful, plus I got a beautiful hotel room in an Arabian style hotel and it sounded like a nice quiet way to end the trip.

The drive down to Ronda was only a couple of hours but then my tom-tom routed me through the center of town to get to my hotel, which meant driving down roads like this

A road that may or may not have been only one direction but was definitely composed largely of cobblestones with lots of blind corners and no way to turn around should I be going the wrong direction. Not that I would know that because my tom-tom’s maps were out of date and Mrs. Tom-tom kept advising me to turn left at times when such an action would have sent my car hurtling down a hill the likes of this.

If you look closely at that bridge, you can see a van disappearing on the left hand side, which will give you an idea of the width of the road.

This picture also serves to illustrate that when the Spanish talk about hills, they aren’t kidding around.

They call this a hill and a gorge. A precipice perched over an abyss more like, though I doubt that description would draw the tourists. But seriously, a hill??

At any rate, the abyss splits the town in two; thus this bridge is the town’s main attraction.

Stunning engineering, no?

And as to the rest of the town… well… there’s a bull ring…

And there are houses…

And… that’s it! Thanks for coming! Walk back down all those hills…

As pretty as Ronda is, had I to do it again I would have bypassed this little “hill town” and headed for Cordoba instead. But hindsight, bygones etc. Next time, right? Instead, I did a lot of hill walking and indeed had a nice quiet night in Ronda.

Tomorrow, my last day in Spain.