Andalusia Spain | Bart Kessels

This isn’t really a laid out trail, but it’s a route we walked in Andalusia, Spain.

A couple of months ago we received mail from the previous owners of our house from Ecktiv. They are a company that plans out routes and books all the accommodations for various types of active holidays. After we’ve gotten that letter we were looking around on their website and we found a route in Spain that looked really good. That’s when we decided, let’s do it! Next thing we know, we’re booking the trip through Ecktiv and looking at airplane tickets to Malaga.

The route we’ll be hiking goes from Ronda to Antequera, which is about 100 kilometers. Each day we’ll be walking about 15 kilometers going up and down various mountains. Because we’re from the Netherlands we never really walked through a mountain area, so this is going to be a new experience for us.

One of the highlights that we already saw on the website is the famous Caminito del Rey, which is a trail that’s built to the wall of a cliff. As you can see in the image, it’s really next to the cliff.

Plaza de Toros

Since we arrived two days before the actual trail started, we had some time to go and explore Ronda. For those of you who haven’t been to Ronda yet, it’s a really beautiful place on top of a mountain.

In Ronda there are a lot of tourist attractions to visit, one of which is the Plaza de Toros, which is the famous bull fighting arena you see in the picture.

Inside this arena you have access to visit the arena itself, but behind the benches there is a small museum of the history of bull fighting in Ronda. If you walk through the museum you can also visit the stables where the bulls were kept before fights. It’s really beautiful to see how those stables are built and how sturdy everything is.

Besides the bull fighting ring, we’ve also gotten a discount code for up to six other tourist attractions in Ronda, so we went to visit those as well. One of those was the old bridge, called the Puente Nuevo. This bridge connects the old town with the new town. Where the old town has a lot of historical buildings while the new town has more shops and restaurants. For our visit we were mostly in the old town, but we did walk this bridge everyday since our hotel was in the new town.

Puente Nuevo

Luckily, our six tourist attractions also included a visit into this bridge. My hopes were that we could get into the bridge and cross the bridge from the inside. But once we’ve gotten inside, it was just an empty room with two windows and a chair. Even though the view was spectacular, the room itself was pretty boring.

However, even though the inside of the bridge was a let down, the view from the outside was simply astonishing. The picture you see here is taken from the stairs walking down into the plateau where you can go inside the bridge. As you can see, this bridge is built between two cliffs, and the cliffs have these plants on them making the picture even more beautiful.

On the second day in Ronda continued exploring the other tourist attractions as well, but those were mostly historical or other significant buildings, such as the old city hall and a church. Even though those were great to visit, they were simply not as spectacular as other places we’ve visited in Ronda.

Old Water Mines

When we were walking the cliffs again we crossed a bridge and started climbing to the streets of the new town again, that when we noticed that there were people all the way on the bottom of the cliffs (on a plateau, not in the water luckily). We were looking from the other side of the cliff how we could go there as well. And luckily my girlfriend thought of something smart, that must be the old water mines.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t included in our discount codes, so we decided to just pay it ourselves because we really wanted to go to the bottom of these cliffs. Once inside, it included a nice garden with a couple of peacocks (and a sibling) just walking around and sitting on top of the walls. We walked quite fast through those gardens because we wanted to get to the bottom.

Once we noticed the door with the stairs, it had a sign that stated that the walk down was around 20 buildings in height. But that wasn’t a problem at all, we walked down the stairs and there were a few occasions where you could go inside the cave to view the mines from the inside. But once we’ve gotten down to the bottom, I was simply amazed by the view. The immense height of the cliffs just baffled me. On this picture you can see a vertical panorama made by my girlfriend that kind of shows the extreme height of these cliffs.

If you ever get the change to visit Ronda, I strongly recommend it. The town has so much history and the nature around it is just plain stunning. Even though it’s really crowded with tourists, for me the views and the history of the place overrule the crowds.

But, since we only had two days in Ronda it was time for us to prepare for the first leg of our hike to Setenil. Because Ecktiv provided us with lunch boxes, we only bought 12 litres of water so we could take three litres of water for the first couple of days. Spoiler alert, that water was really worth it.