Pueblos blancos

I ended up leaving Granada a day early because I wanted to see Ronda and the white villages, and the only day I could arrange a tour was on Saturday.  So after my long day of travel on Wednesday, I had an unnecessarily long one again on Friday.  One of those silly travel problems.  I couldn't buy a train ticket online because you must print it out - you cannot print it at the station - and I had no printer.  I couldn't buy a bus ticket online because they only acceot Spanish credit cards.  So I just went to the bus station at 4 and ... the 4:30 bus was sold out.  I backtracked to the train station and got a ticket for 5:30, but had over an hour wait and the train took a little later than its scheduled three hours.  With the taxi ride to my apartment in Seville, this simple three hour trip took over six hours.  Ah, travel.

It turns out that my apartment is just off the Alameda de Hercules.  An alameda is a tree lined street, but this one is more like a concrete park six blocks long and a block wide.  And by the time I put down my suitcase and went out for a walk at 10 PM, I was just in time for dinner.  All of the restaurants and bars on the Alameda were hopping.  I took this picture a week later when I returned from Cordoba in daylight.

The next morning when I met the driver/guide, it turned out that there were four of us - besides me, a family of three that included fairly large parents and a skinny college girl.  Our vehicle was a teeny tiny European car and since I was alone (and first to be picked up) I got the front seat and the three of them squeezed in the back.  Not the best arrangements for them.

From the guidebooks I understood that white houses hung off the side of the mountain.  Not at all.  The villages are more like Swiss villages nestled at the foot of mountains, but all of the houses are white.  It is beautiful rolling countryside, and then every so often we would come to a pueblo blanco.  The first was Zahara.  But first we stopped at a random castle left over from the war with the Moors.

Zahara from a distance

Zahara up close

Zahara is very small with only a few thousand inhabitants, most of whom are elderly.  The streets are all steep and there are few services - no schools or hospital.  It reminded me of Venice:  absolutely beautiful but impossible to live there.

The guidebooks also said the roads were narrow and winding.  That was another understatement.  Our guide was not a very good guide, but he was an excellent driver, taking us on roads that I could never drive on with simply incredible views.  Hard to tell from the picture, but this is a one lane road with switchback all the way up the mountain, and of course there is two way traffic, but not a lot of it.  There were several bicyclists too.  What a great road for biking and what beautiful views.

After lunch in another pueblo blanco, we went to Ronda, a city built on two sides of a giant gorge.  Needless to say, the Romans got there first and built a bridge.  In the 1600, the Spanish built a bridge across a lower part, but beginning in 1751, they built the New Bridge which crosses at the high point and joins the two sides of the city.  Pretty incredible.

Our guide drove us down a ridiculously steep and twisty gravel road to see the view up.  Then we took a walking tour of the city ending on top of the bridge for the view down.  This is the view from the bottom of the twisty road and those people are walking to a starting point to climb.  The building on the left side is a hotel.

For me, the incredible thing about Ronda is that they built the city on both sides of the ravine with a New Bridge over two hundred years ago.  In our free time, I took a tour of one of the highlights of Ronda, the first bullring.  I'll never go to a bull fight, but the history was pretty interesting.

After a two hour drive back to Seville, I settled into my apartment and will start school tomorrow.