Andalusia Journal 2004
Pueblos Blancos
We drove to Ronda and got rooms at the Hostal Andalucia, a basic, clean place next to the train station.
We decided to walk to dinner, crossing the "old bridge", which I thought was the famous one. It turns out the famous one is the "new bridge", which is only new in comparison to the old one. The old, very ancient bridge is about maybe 200 feet lower than the rather ancient new bridge, so we had to stroll down a steep hill to cross the bridge, and stroll back up another. The hill was quite a bit for Susanne to take, but we made it, exhausted. Then we crossed back via the new bridge, which was very cool but a little harrowing for being so very very high off the ground (it spans a massive gorge) while being at the same time so very very old.
We ate dinner at the Don Miguel, which is in a hotel right on the gorge and has dining terraces overlooking it. We ate inside, and had very good appetizers: consome con yema for me (broth with an egg yolk in it, which I stirred up) and Eric and Susanne both had ajoblanco soup, a cold white garlic soup with almond. It had raisins in the bottom, which Eric said was actually tasty, since they tasted almost entirely like garlic, and didn't have the rough texture of dried raisins. Eric's entree was good: perdiz (partridge) in almond; Susanne and I had much worse luck. My duck in date sauce was not very good (a bit overcooked), while Susanne's tuna encebollada was even worse.
For desert, we all had a "sorbete de cava y limón", which it turns out is not (traditionally) the same as sorbet, but rather a cold icy drink. That was pretty tasty.
Then we walked home and went to bed.
12/1
In the morning, we checked out and drove into the center of town by the new bridge to have breakfast and also walk around on the far side of the bridge, known as the ciudad. Breakfast was an uninspired bit of food at the Café de India. I had unfortunately developed a bit of a medical condition (probably a result of my stressful walk the previous day, plus the aftereffects of food poisoning) and could hardly walk, so I waited in the car while Eric and Susanne looked at souvenirs and artisan-made stuff for a little bit.
We drove off for a tour of the pueblos blancos (white towns). Our goal was to get to Gaucín, which is a town with spectacular views – the Mediterranean in the distance, and on a clear day, Morocco. The road was twisty and turny, and we were treated to truly spectacular views of the mountains and the towns.
Gaucín is more or less a hilltop town, except that the actual top of the hill is even higher up and sports the ruins of a castle – there must be some way to get to it, or it couldn't have been built, but it truly seems impossible. We drove the car up tiny streets only wide enough for the car, coming to park by a vista park near the cemetery. (The cemetery was not something we were interested in seeing, but I peaked in and noticed that all the graves were stacked whitewashed mausoleums, like a little city of the dead.) From the park we had the spectacular view we came for, though Morocco was not in fact visible.
We drove a little past Gaucín to have lunch at a little restaurant just outside of town called Restaurante Breñaverde, which had a really nice view. It was lunchtime on a Sunday, and so it was busy, and reminded us of some places we went to in Portugal and Italy on Sundays.
Lunch was basically good. Eric had an ensalada mixta followed by a lovely rabbit cooked with garlic. I had another consome, which I didn't care for because the taste was too marrowy, then an ensalada mixta, and finally quails (hard to eat, with so little meat, but basically tasty). Susanne had consome con picadillo, which had the same overly marrowy broth and so she didn't much care for it; followed by prawns in garlic oil, which was good. She also had the only desert, a bad flan.
We drove back through Gaucín before heading northwest toward Arcos de la Frontera. We passed through some more lovely terrain, including, curiously, a small town built up as a mountain resort for Spaniards – nestled in the mountains off a small winding road, much harder to reach than the towns we passed through between Ronda and Gaucín, there rose up a complex of condominiums, followed by the more traditional old town center. After a while, though, the winding mountain roads got old, and I couldn't wait to get to Ronda.
Upon reaching Ronda, however, we found a policeman blocking the entrance to the old town. Undeterred, we found another way in on the other side. Ronda is built on a long ridge that rises up from the earth, so that the old town has cliffs on three sides and a slope on the other. We found our way to the base of that slope and then drove up the only road. At the end, the road is only wide enough for one car, so a pair of traffic lights between the beginning of the narrow road and the plaza at the end regulate traffic, alternating between ingoing and outgoing cars. However, the process broke down as we went through – the light turned green and we proceeded, followed by the three cars behind us. Some 25 feet later two cars came around the corner. I pulled over at the one wider part of the road, but the cars behind me refused to back up (though we were clearly in the best position to back up and let them through). The two cars coming the opposite direction managed to pull forward enough that I was able to squeeze past the last car (to my surprise really; I thought it was basically an impasse). I made it up to the plaza and parked – I don't know what happened to the rest of those cars, but they must have sorted it out somehow (they weren't there the next morning).
The town continues, car-free except for residents, for perhaps a mile or so past the plaza, though we didn't end up seeing the whole thing.
Our hotel was just around the corner, more or less – a nice hotel called Hotel el Convento. When we asked for rooms, we were offered a double room with or without a balcony. "With", we replied, and Eric and I were given a large, luxurious room with a very big balcony, more like a terrace, literally on the edge of the town overlooking a cliff. It was amazing! Below us were fields, rolling hills, roads, unbelievably far away – higher that if we were in a skyscraper.
We liked the hotel so much that we thought we would eat at their restaurant, which oddly was a couple of streets over. It seemed promising, having won an award in 1990 for something like best restaurant in Spain or Andalucia. However, now, in 2002 it was basically terrible yet expensive. I started with revuelto (scrambled eggs) with green asparagus which just tasted odd, and not much like asparagus; for an entree I order a pheasant dish which was so overcooked as to be virtually inedible. Susanne had a similar experience: her consome with ham and egg was not terrible, the cheese salad she ordered was OK (well, I thought it weird – a young fresh cheese cubed, dressed with a thousand-island-like dressing), but her duck entree was also overcooked and inedible (and its sauce was, inexplicably, black). Eric had the consome with ham and egg too, followed by lamb chop ajillo, which turned out to be quite good – he felt bad for having a good dish when ours were so terrible. Ajillo is olive oil and garlic, really nothing more – how can you go wrong? We all agreed that it was delicious. Our wine, a Rioja reserva, was also really good. We don't usually order or buy Rioja reserva in the US, because it's expensive, but in Spain it's not (though it's of course more expensive than crianza) – so we decided to take advantage of that.
Desert went better. I had a nice, if somewhat odd, apple and honey thing. Susanne had a chocolate mouse which seemed to have cookie crumbs in it, which was also good. Eric's desert was a homemade cream custard called natilla, which he liked a lot. He also had an after dinner drink of Noe, an aged pedro ximínez sherry – which was also delicious, almost like drinking molasses.
That night, we slept well, in the last double bed we would see for the rest of the trip. (So often a European "double" bed is two single beds pushed together.)
Though we wouldn't go back to the restaurant, we would go back to the hotel in a second.
12/2
We had breakfast in the hotel – tostadas with butter, coffee, chocolate, etc. Orange juice, too, I think.
We wanted to have a walk, but I still had trouble walking a lot. Plus, as we headed away from the plaza, the path descended quite a bit before going back up again – and we just did not want to walk that far down a hill. Had I been feeling better I probably would have made it happen, but we had a nice visit to the town without going to the far end, and I'm not even sure that what we would have found had we done it would have been worth it.
We stopped instead into an artisan porcelain studio. The woman attending was also painting pottery at a big table behind the desk. The pottery, mostly tiles, was very nice, and we decided to buy a tile painted with an image of a road in the town.