White is for magic

Ronda, founded in the 9th century BC and inhabited by the Celts, Phoenicians, Romans and Moors, had captured the imagination of an entire generation of viajeros románticos or romantic travellers, who during the 18th and 19th centuries, wanted to explore the pristine, untouched parts of Europe. Much before us, writers of repute — Alexandre Dumas, Rainer Maria Rilke, Ernest Hemingway and Orson Welles — had been enchanted by Ronda, with its cobbled alleys and wrought-iron balconies.

The photogenic hill town’s riveting feature is the El Tajo gorge that plummets 492 feet down into the river Guadalevín. A thousand fireflies buzzed in the afternoon air above the gorge next to the Puente Nuevo, lending it an air of enchantment. Puente Nuevo (the “new bridge”, though it dates back to the mid-1700s) has a daunting past. Above its central arch is a secret chamber. During the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), many a Nationalist and Republican was tossed out of the windows of this chamber into the gorge. In Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, the author is said to have based the incident of Fascist sympathisers being thrown off the cliffs of an Andalusian town upon a similar event in Ronda.

Standing upon the Puente Nuevo, we watched the sierras of Ronda in the distance. There was a time when they were the haunts of bandits. Memories of those dire days live on in a small but unique museum, the Museo del Bandolero (Museum of Bandits). Old prints narrate stories of young bandoleros, who in the 1800s, became so powerful that the guardia civil was created to put an end to their disruptive activities. In the late 1800s, a traveller near Málaga had described the modus operandi of a bandit who was usually bedecked in amulets and charms — he crept up quietly behind his victim to “muffle his head and arms in a cloak, and then relieve him of his valuables”. Resistance earned a gory death for “he is instantly disembowelled with the dexterous thrust of a knife…”

I was particularly taken by the tale of Diego Corrientes Mateos, an 18th century bandit known for his generosity to the poor. The Spanish king had put up a reward of 100 gold pieces for his capture. Corrientes, who had fled to Portugal, was captured and brought back to Seville, his home town. He was hung, his body cut into pieces and sent to the provinces where he had operated. But his head was buried in a church in Seville.

The Puente Nuevo divides Ronda into mercadillo (new town) and la ciudad (old town), but two older bridges span the El Tajo. Of them, the oldest bridge was constructed by the Romans when they occupied Ronda at the time of Julius Caesar. The other Moorish bridge leads to an exotic hammam, Baños de los Arabes, the former bathing houses of the Moors. The Arab baths differed from the Roman baths in the concept of cleansing the body — while the Romans soaked in hot pools, the Moors used steam to purify the body before entering the mosque that stood adjacent to the baths.

On the streets of la ciudad, we saw further signs of intermingling of Ronda’s Moorish and Christian past. The minarets of the churches of San Sebastian and Iglesia de Santa María la Mayor are both, originally, Moorish in style. The sandstone Almocábar Gate that stands at the entrance to Ronda was built by the Almohad rulers in the 13th century, but taken over by Ferdinand II of Aragon in 1485. As a token of the Reconquista, the Christians erected a church, the Iglesia del Espiritu Santo, over the tower of the Almohads.

The most bloodthirsty aspect of Ronda awaited us at the mercadillo. The new town, which goes back to the 15th century, has its share of beautiful old churches and plazas, but the Plaza de Toros, Spain’s oldest bull ring, is its key feature. Medieval Spain’s favourite sport dates back to the 16th century, to an occasion when a nobleman was learning to ride in Ronda’s famous equestrian school. Part of the training included a chase round a ring by an angry bull. At one point, the rider found himself on the ground and a pair of horns approaching him at great speed. He was saved by Francisco Romero, a local boy, who jumped into the ring and distracted the bull with a wave of his hat.

My interest in Ronda’s bullfighting heritage stemmed from Hemingway and his many non-fiction accounts of his obsession with matadors and their dangerous profession. Ronda, according to him, is the town where you should see your first bullfight in Spain, for every year it hosts a festival called Corrida Goyesca when its bullfighting past is recreated at its finest. Outside the sandstone coloured bullring of Plaza de Toros, I spotted the bronze figure of the matador, Cayetano Ordóñez y Aguilera. Better known as Niño de la Palma because his parents owned a shoe shop called La Palma, Ordóñez was a Spanish legend who had faced over 3,000 bulls and inspired Hemingway to base the character of Pedro Romero in The Sun Also Rises upon him.

It is not without reason that Hemingway had written of Ronda as the place to go “if you ever go to Spain on a honeymoon or if you ever bolt with anyone”. When you come upon this old hill town, it is almost a feeling of deja vu. You will, perhaps, be as smitten by it as was Rilke, who had declared passionately, “I have sought everywhere the city of my dreams, and I have finally found it in Ronda.”

Arundhati Basu is a writer, translator and blogger based in the UK