Tajo de Ronda

El Tajo is the gorge that splits the town of Ronda in two. The Guadalevín river has cut it straight through the rock plateau on which the town stands, leaving a chasm roughly 500 metres long, about 100 metres deep and in places only 50 metres wide. The houses of both halves are built right to the lip of the cliffs, and the view down from the edge — sheer walls, the thread of water far below, and the open farmland of the valley beyond — is one of the most dramatic urban landscapes in Spain. In 2019 the gorge was declared a Natural Monument of Andalusia. Kestrels and peregrine falcons nest in its walls, and swifts and crows wheel through it all summer.

Three bridges tie the town together across the Tajo and the ravine below it. The most famous, the Puente Nuevo, was completed in 1793 after more than three decades of work, to a design by José Martín de Aldehuela; an earlier single-arch bridge built on the same spot had collapsed in 1741, killing some fifty people. The new stone bridge rises from the bottom of the gorge, and a chamber above its central arch was used over the centuries for various purposes, including as a prison. Downstream, the smaller Puente Viejo and the older bridge often called Roman or Arab cross the river where the gorge opens out. From the foot of the cliffs, the Puente Nuevo appears in its full height, framed by the rock.

Ronda itself, perched at about 750 metres, was under Muslim rule from the early eighth century until the Crown of Castile took it in 1485, and the old quarter, La Ciudad, keeps a tight grid of whitewashed streets, palaces and churches. At the Casa del Rey Moro a stairway cut inside the cliff, known as the Water Mine, leads down to the river from the Moorish period. The town drew foreign writers and artists in the twentieth century: Rainer Maria Rilke spent the winter of 1912–1913 here, and Ernest Hemingway and Orson Welles both knew it well — Welles's ashes were laid in a well on the country estate of his friend, the bullfighter Antonio Ordóñez. Local tradition links the gorge with violent episodes of the Civil War, but historians regard the story of prisoners thrown into the Tajo as largely legend.

Getting there

The gorge runs through the centre of Ronda, in the mountains of the province of Málaga. The nearest airport by distance is Gibraltar (GIB), about 67 km away, but most visitors arrive through Málaga-Costa del Sol Airport (AGP), about 60 km in a straight line. Ronda has a railway station on the line between Algeciras and Bobadilla, and the old town and the bridge viewpoints are within walking distance of it.