First day in Andalucia's "must see" - Ronda

Ronda was a place in our minds to visit since march last year, when Martyna went to Andalucia and didn't have the opportunity to go there.

The pictures from the Internet show a city built in top of a mountain divided by an abiss, and connected by three bridges. In fact we didn't know what to expect. It could be even a place to be there some hours, take some pictures and leave. But... it wasn't.

After the first hour spent there, we cancelled our plans of leaving right away in the morning of the next day. There was to much to see, too many point of views to admire that architecture work, those landscapes, those narrow streets.

Even though it is a touristical place, Ronda is not asfixiated by the tourists. You can visit all the places without feeling that it is too much croweded.

After we arrived to the city, we noticed that it was too big for our expectations. It is an historical place, with an historical centre, but also a city with 30,000 inhabitants, with the shops and facilities that they need. We arrived and we went straight to the tourist information center. We discovered right away that our reservation made in the previous night was a catch. Our hostel was in middle of the action. 50 meters from it there was the landmark of Ronda, the New Bridge, that took more than 40 years to be built - between 1751 and 1793 - and that is 120m tall, above the impressive canyon that divides the city.

Ronda is an El Dorado for History fans. There are historical landmarks since the roman ocupation, and a lot more to discover, as we could witness in some backyards of the houses where arqueological sites were still active.

The evolution of the civilization in that city is marked by the bridges. The smaller and older is called Roman Bridge, or San Miguel Bridge - even though that the historicians say that it is not roman. The second one is the Arab Bridge, built during the arab occupation of the place, and the third, the New Bridge is the one that we already mentioned above.

We started from the younger bridge to the older one. The younger is by its height impressive, but also by its architecture. We walked around it, checked the viewpoints, and then we went to the Arab Bridge, climbing the stair on the oposite margin. Then... it started raining. We ran to the hostel, but the rain stopped right away and we could go back to the sightseeing part. Then the hunger took over us. In Spain, you should eat tapas, and so we did. With so much choice to eat those, till now we are sure that we chose the worst place that we could, so bad that we left it still with our bellies rumbling. So we decided to give a try to the restaurant that was connected to our hostel. There we didn't have reasons to complain about the food, or about the great sangria :).