You know how you are standing there waiting to get onto a plane and they start calling out people for upgrades or waiting for that cheap hire car that might be upgraded to something sporty and sexy – well it wasn’t out lucky day!!! We made our way to the train station in Granada to pick up our ordered automatic small buzz box that we were going to drive back to Seville. Alas, no automatic small buzz boxes available – just this honking great…..
OVLOV with no ground clearance and the only automatic they had!!! It was humongous. We don’t mind stick vehicles, especially Di, but when you are driving on unfamiliar roads in a foreign country you need to make things as simple as possible for yourself, so hence we took it.
So this was the trajectory for today. Our first stop was to be Ronda but the road out of Granada happened to take us along part of the train route we had come in on.
The Spanish have quite the reputation of building very good train networks and a lot of their strategy is to keep it straight and to do that, elevation is the way to go.
We knew on our train trip to Granada that a lot of it was on elevated track as well as utilizing the tilt system which is necessary if you want to get speeds of 330k/hr which we experienced.
Having made it to Ronda, our first site to visit was the Plaza de Toros de Ronda where the annual bullfight called the Corrida Goyesca is held.
We are not going to glorify bullfighting in any way but will acknowledge the beauty of the building.
Bullfighting has always had its detractors from early on and probably they are becoming a lot more vocal.
Before anyone commends about the bull having two horns, it is a girl bull!!!
Ronda is also very well known for the Puente Nuevo stone bridge spanning the El Tajo gorge which no doubt you will have seen photos of. Work on the bridge commenced in 1751 and was completed in 1793.
Ronda is a mountaintop city in Spain’s Malaga province that’s set dramatically above the gorge which we drove down into to get the photo. Some hardy souls walked down to get the photo and then had the unhappy task of walking back up. We utilized our huge urban assault vehicle to save four of them making that tortuous trip back up.
We’ve been indulging (overly) in the Spanish cuisine and been enjoying the variety. Sometimes we think we make some educated guesses from the menu and in this case, it was a called a “tomato and goat cheese salad with dressing – well we go that wrong. It was one tomato with some goat cheese in it – not quite what we have bargained for but oh gosh, it was yummy.
Last spot to drop off at was Zahara de la Sierra which is in national park region and had been recommended to us by our friends we have been staying with when in Sevilla. It is a quintessential white washed village which is just stunning…..that was….until we drove into it. Going up was fine, going down through the very narrow steep streets in a huge tank with no ground clearance was nerve wracking. We were convinced we were going to lose our no claims bonus on several occasions.
The town was originally a Moorish outpost and a perfect site for a castle to be built as a fortress. The remains of the Moorish castle still exist, and it was ruled by Arabs until 1407.
We then drove the final 150k back to Sevilla where we handed the tank back, in one piece, and then made our way out to our friend’s home where we just crashed.
It has been a very busy four days touring around the Andalusian region of Spain and quite the education about this whole Catholic, Muslim and Jewish melding of cultures.
Steps were a little down at 1O,O24 today but not surprising as we drove 400k.
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