The road to Ronda...

After our stay at Mojas our next stop on our tour of Spain was the mountaintop town of Ronda but first we had to get there! 

The route is a winding road that continues to rise as you progress.  The higher up you get the more spectacular the views become, at one point you can see back down the coast as far as Gibraltar.  As the driver I missed out on a lot of them being on the side of the road away from the valley for the most part and there are few stopping points. With the shear drop that there is along much of the road this was not such a problem for me.  

As you can see from the pic. below concentration was important!

One of the only disappointing things of our road-trip was that most of our accommodation owners were 'ghost hosts' which was not a major problem but having been in the business of hosting ourselves we felt slightly miffed at the lack of human contact. This did  prove a problem however at our accommodation in Ronda as trying to contact them was proving difficult as we needed the codes to access the parking and accommodation.

We knew we had arrived but could only do a drive past our accommodation and then find somewhere to park temporarily while awaiting a response. Bit of a struggle in a strange city but we eventually found a space, parked up and walked into the city.

As we walked we got areal sense of exactly how high up the city actually sits!

One side of the road featured some great wall art.

We continued down the road until we reached the 'Alameda del Tajo' which are gardens that are mainly tree lined paths and fountains, with low lying shrubs, a pleasant walk as you head towards the balcony area overlooking the valley below.

The views are awesome, you can see the entire valley below from several viewpoints.

We then continued on to the square in front of the bullring where we found the tourist office and picked up a map, at least we would be able to find our way back to the car!

It also showed us we were not far from the city's main attraction the Puente Nuevo, not  exactly new as it was built between 1751-1793. It sits 98 meters above the Tajo de Ronda, a gorge carved by the Guadalevín River and connects the historic and modern areas of the town.

We decided to go down to the 'Mirador de Cuenca' a viewpoint where you get  great photos of the bridge.

Below is the view from the bridge down to where we took the photo.

We were eventually contacted by our host so headed back to our car and got settled into our apartment before heading back out to do more exploring!