We had heard and read that the white hill towns of Andalucia in southern Spain were pretty cool, so we spent a few days in that region after Sevilla. Based on advice from my ever-trusty travel advisor Rick Steves, we based ourselves in the town of Ronda, itself one of the white hill towns, and took day trips from there. And it was . . . fine. We had expected something like the hill towns in Tuscany, which happen to be on hills but are also beautiful and relaxed and have fabulous food and wine. But I think our conclusion is that the most interesting thing about these towns is just that they are all white. They paint the houses white to combat the summer heat, which can be brutal – 110-120. Yes, it’s pretty, but more like “oh, that’s nice” than something you just can’t get enough of. So we drove around and saw some towns.
We stopped and walked through a few of them, including Arcos de la Frontera – on the day, when unbeknownst to us, they happened to have some sort of bull-running event planned. When we arrived and parked in the parking garage on the edge of town and started walking in toward the center, we thought it was really weird that several nearly-empty bars had music blaring and temporary bars set up on the streets outside. There were also these big metal gates set up all along one side of the main street through town:
As we walked further into the town, there were more crowds, clearly in party mode. Is this just what they do on Saturdays in this town?
After we broke away from the crowds on the main street and were walking on some of the quieter side streets, we noticed this poster:
Between the amount of drinking and carrying on this early in the day, and the clear photo evidence on the poster, we are pretty confident someone was going to get gored that night. Not something we were excited to witness, so we went back to the security and relative boredom of Ronda. On the upside, our apartment there was incredibly comfortable (the kids each had their own rooms!) and it was right on the main pedestrian street. And we found a place that would do our laundry (including drying and folding!) and have it ready for pickup in less than 24 hours.
One of the white hill towns was actually built into the caves that formed at the bottom of the cliffs. Very unique and interesting to walk around for a bit – but very crowded, even this early in the year:
We did go to a cool Andalucian guitar show while we were there. This guy has been playing for something like 40 years and was pretty amazing to watch and listen to – lots of very fast finger work that Ryan says is very hard. Not a bad way to spend an hour.
So, Ronda was fine. Onward!
(And here are some more pictures:)
