Travels in Spain – Andalucía, Ronda and the Puente Nuevo

“We sighted Ronda. It was raised up in the mountains, like a natural extension of the landscape, and in the sunlight it seemed to me to be the most beautiful city in the world.” –  José Agustín Goytisolo

Ronda  is one of the pueblos blancos (white towns) so-called because it is whitewashed in the old Moorish tradition and sits like a wedding cake on the surrounding ragged countryside.  It also happens to be one of the most spectacularly located towns in Andalucía sitting on a massive rocky outcrop straddling a precipitous limestone cleft in the mountains.

Ronda is most famous for a one hundred and thirty metre high bridge, the Puente Nuevo, whose name means ‘new bridge’ and which spans a dramatic gorge that divides the city in two.

To put that into some sort of perspective it is the height of thirty London double-decker buses, seven times higher than the Presidents’ faces at Mount Rushmoor, four times higher than the Aqueduct of Segovia, two and half times higher than Niagara Falls and more or less the same height as the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

The bridge was begun in 1751 and took forty-two years to complete.  It is supposedly one of the most photographed structures in Spain and often quoted as one of the top places to see in Europe and lots of people must have taken that recommendation literally because this afternoon the town was swarming with day-trippers from Seville and the Costa del Sol.

We crossed the bridge and looked out over the sprawling patchwork landscape of burnt brown, cream, beige and copper coloured fields that spilled out across the flat valley plain punctuated with terraces of irrigated green, a meandering river far below, swollen by recent rain and a dramatic grey sky full of heavy cloud and pregnant stormy menace.

The author Ernest Hemingway and actor and film director Orson Welles both lived in Ronda at some point in their lives (it seems that they lived almost everywhere) and both wrote warmly about the place.  Hemingway’s novel ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ describes the murder of five hundred fascist Nationalist sympathisers early in the Spanish Civil War by being thrown from the cliffs of El Tajo and into the Rio Guadalquivir by the Republican forces.

Or possibly vice versa, I have never read the book so am not absolutely sure and neither are the historical accounts because even after seventy-five years both sides continue to accuse each other of the grisly crime but those who lost their lives are in some small way poetically remembered by Orson Welles who said – “A man does not belong to the place where he was born, but where he chooses to die”

We walked over the bridge and admired the expansive views over the surrounding countryside and from here it was easy to understand why Ronda was one of the last Moorish strongholds in Spain, only finally falling to the Christian armies in 1485 just seven years before the fall of Granada.

It was possible to visit the interior of the bridge by climbing down a set of steps carved into the side of the canyon and then entering a chamber where there was an interesting exhibition in what was once the guard-house describing the history of the bridge and its construction.  Just behind the guard-house was the cramped prison, which allegedly both sides used for imprisonment and unimaginable torture during the civil war.

Ronda, it turns out, has three bridges, the first and lowest may have been Roman but was certainly Moorish and the second was built in the middle ages.  They are both at the bottom of the canyon and as both the old town and the new town were at the top this meant a lot of aching legs and creaking wagon wheels to get between the two so the third and most famous bridge was built right at the top to make life a whole lot easier for everyone.

In the evening we went into the town looking for somewhere to eat.  It was much quieter now that the tourist buses had left and there was plenty of choice.  After a larger than planned lunch neither of us were especially hungry so we were easily talked into a tapas bar with a promise of a mixed plate of local specialities.

According to legend, the tapas tradition began when the King of Castile, Alfonso the Wise (if I was King I think I would like to be called ‘the Wise’) visited a tavern in the town of Ventorillo del Chato in the province of Cádiz, and ordered a glass of sherry.  There was a gusty wind, so the innkeeper served him his glass of sherry covered by a slice of ham to prevent the sherry from getting dirty.  The King liked it, and when he asked for a second glass, he requested another tapa or ‘cover’ just like the first.

This developed into the practice of using slices of bread or meat as a practical measure meant to prevent fruit flies from hovering over the drink. The meat used to cover the sherry was normally ham or chorizo, which are both very salty and activate thirst and because of this, bartenders and restaurant owners began creating a variety of snacks to serve with sherry, thus increasing their alcohol sales.

It wasn’t the best tapas that we have tasted but to be fair it was traditional and authentic and we liked that and when we had finished we left and returned to the Hotel Poeta de Ronda and hoped that tomorrow the rain would stay away.

Morocco, Essaouira – Medieval Time Travel

Walking around the Medina and the Souks I got a sense that very little has changed here for several hundred years.

Like almost everyone I guess, I have always been fascinated by the possibility of time travel and in the heart of the old town it was possible to imagine stepping back to the Middle Ages but this, let me tell you, was just about as close to Medieval as I would probably want to get.

There is a tourist attraction in York (UK) which recreates a Viking village complete with sights, sounds and smells.  This I thought was similar except it is for real. There are some curious odours, that’s for sure.  In the butchers souk huge beef carcasses hang and release the aroma of slaughtered animals and blood soaked sawdust while close by fresh killed chickens dangle from hooks, in the fish souk there were more fish heads and guts and in the vegetable market mountains of rotting leaves were piled up behind the stalls.  Everywhere rubbish is left in convenient doorways and alleys and it is going to stay there all day until cleared sometime in the night.

Beneath the street I could see that the inadequate drains were blocked with years of debris and lack of cleaning and must surely be completely unable to deal with whatever is down there.  I reminded myself that this was January and wondered just what it might be like in the in August in the heat of summer!

Everywhere there is street food, bread, biscuits, pastries and fast food cafés on every corner.  When I had visited Marrakech in 2009 I had a street-side snack which upset my stomach so I was nervous here but on one occasion could not resist the temptation of a chicken kebab wrap, a combination of meat, cheese, various salads and a secret sauce and it was delicious and thankfully without any unsettling consequences.

Away from the food market there were small shops selling spices, herbs and quack remedies from over a thousand years ago.  We stopped and shared tea with a trader and then felt obliged to buy a bag of various spices and when I reckoned up later I was certain that we had been overcharged.

You need to be careful in Morocco because most of the traders in the souks want to separate tourists from their money as quickly as they can so it is important to have your wits about you and it is important to remember that most of them want to sell you something that you do not really need.

As a consequence of the fact that Morocco does not have a welfare payments system there is no financial safety net for those who fall on hard times and there are therefore a lot of beggars on the street.  For me this creates a huge dilemma, do I give to one but not the other or, on the basis that I cannot give to everyone, do I give to none at all?  This is like the film ‘Sophie’s Choice’.  I choose the first option and put some money in my pocket and give a coin here and there based simply on who to me appears to be the most desperate.

There are hustlers too and these are the people to give a wide berth.  They follow, they pester, they won’t take no for an answer and they cling on like Velcro.  On several occasions I was offered hashish to smoke (a sort of marijuana) or cannabis ‘space cakes’ and had to be really firm in turning them down.  And then I worry, ‘will they rob me’ and in quieter streets I was forever nervous of footsteps from behind of someone blocking the way ahead.  I am sure I didn’t really need to worry at all, I am certain that there was never any real danger and generally speaking Essaouira was a lot more relaxed and less challenging than Marrakech or Fes.

Down one of these side streets we came across a small museum and stepped inside.  It was quiet, there were more attendants than visitors and inside there were some interesting exhibits but mostly I could only guess what they were because the only European explanations were in French.

Outside of the old city walls there is a lot more of Essaouira and once through any of the four main gates there was a much more modern European feel about the place with more familiar shops and traffic and suddenly it was necessary to remember that we were no longer in a pedestrianised environment.

Moroccans are notoriously poor drivers and the accident and injury rates are scarily high.  I don’t think there is a Highway Code in Morocco, I have looked and certainly can’t find one. Crossing a road is a very tricky process because, cars and lorries don’t give way to people  in the same way that it is expected they will in the UK  so this was a potentially death defying procedure.

There are zebra crossings marked out in the roads but they are there only for a bit of highway decoration and are not something a walker can rely upon so we watched the locals as they strayed into the carriageways and we stuck close to them because they appeared to have a sort of uncanny sixth sense about which vehicles would stop and which would simply mow a pedestrian down without a second thought. Crossing the road here is even more dangerous than juggling gelignite!

We didn’t stay long outside the town wall; as well as being dangerous it is also a lot less interesting so after we had satisfied our curiosity we returned via an area which has the potential to be an nice piece of park land but it is badly maintained and a hang out spot for beggars and homeless people so is an area where it is preferable not to linger.  In the centre is a statue of Orson Welles who used Essaouira as a location for his film Othello but the local people don’t seem to especially appreciate that and the bust is damaged and covered in graffiti.

We were glad to return through the gate through the fortress walls and resume our Medieval time travel experience.