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The view out the window of our parador
in Ronda, taken at 8:25 in the morning. Spain is way in the west of its time zone, and so this was around or before sunrise. |
Today, Saturday, we walked around Ronda in the morning and early afternoon, and were on our own for lunch and the rest of the afternoon.
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We started the day with a nice breakfast buffet, and around ten we met up with an elderly gentleman named Diego Martínez who showed us around his city. You see him in the left picture, upper row (small image; large) explaining something to the members of our group. This was in the Palacio Mondragón, our first stop, evidently one of the most important nonreligious buildings in Ronda, where all the other pictures in this group were taken. The building evidently dates back to Moorish days, but has been added to over the centuries. Really a lovely place. Full of tourists, too, like everything in Ronda! For the remaining pictures: Top right: small image, large; bottom left: small image, large; bottom center: small image, large; bottom right: small image, large. Naturally, you can find similar pictures in Mark’s page, and also all over the web, ’cause let’s face it, this spot is eminently photographable.
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Next stop was the Church of Santa María la Mayor—my guess is that it’s the church that’s “the greater”, not Mary. Not my notion of the ideal decorative spirit for a place of religion, but then I’m a radical Protestant. It was Mary everywhere, appropriately, but for me, just too much decorative gimcrackery. Anyhow, you get the small images by clicking on the pictures, and the big ones by clicking on the bullet (•) below each one.
I rather like this picture of Mark photographing a huge reredos, or is it a retable? The piece is really magnificent, as the large image shows very clearly (less clear, I suppose, in the small). You can see Sr. Martínez explaining the statue of Mary to someone who’s outside the picture. Mark points out that having your feet on the Moon goes back to some Roman goddess, but one can also say it has something to do with Mary’s being Queen of Heaven.
We spent quite a bit of time in Santa María la Mayor, and it was worth it. But we eventually left, and Sr. Martínez continued showing us around. The city is on the edge of a huge cliff, some of the pictures have already shown that, and the river runs through an incredibly deep chasm. The possibilities for dramatic photographs are endless, and you know that we were not the first to take advantage of them.
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Sr. Martínez had lots to tell us about the history of the city. Its roots are in the pre-Muslim period, but it evidently was an important city for the Moors, and the architecture showed well the changing cultural influences. There he is in the upper left picture in the block to the right (small image, large), with a bunch of us listening in fascination. I took the picture in the upper right position to show how far the busy city sits above the plain below (small image, large).
Our guide offered us the opportunity to walk down towards the river below, or to stay up on the higher level for a time, exploring on our own while the others climbed down and then back up. Clearly he had no desire for that kind of exercise, and Mark and I decided that we didn’t, either. So we looked out over the views, took pictures, and relaxed a bit. As I recall, it was rather chilly at that time of day. In the lower left picture in this block (small image; large), Mark looks out from a high point onto the view below; and I took the two other pictures looking downwards to the river below (right middle: small image, large; right bottom: small image, large).
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Not so much to say about the individual pictures here: most were taken in the interval when the majority of the folks in the group were on their jaunt down into the ravine to get a better look at the bridge. So again, to get the “small image”, click on the thumbnail, and to get the “big”, click on the bullet below the picture. The exception to my remark about there being nothing much to say is that the picture of the bridge at the bottom left was taken after lunch, when the lighting was very different; and the botttom right is of Mark walking in the tourist-crowded commercial streets of Ronda.
Our tour with Sr. Martínez lasted two and a half or three hours, and afterwards, we were on our own for the rest of the day. Mark and I wandered around the commercial part of town, looking in at shops and keeping an eye out for a restaurant that might be likely. Mark picked up a refrigerator magnet, that’s all we bought. We hit on a pleasant-enough restaurant, I won’t say the name, where we had a wonderful salad of mushrooms in sauce, and followed this up with venison for Mark, a rather tough and fatty veal cutlet for me. A very nice wine, a Sierras de Málaga, was perhaps the best part of the meal, but we also finished off the whole with a Fino sherry, Pedro Ximénez Gran Reserva, accurately described by Nick as greatly resembling prune juice. Mark did say, I recall, that the venison was very good.
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After lunch, on our own, we decided to go downwards on the jaunt that we had skipped in the morning. The weather was much more pleasant: cold, dark, and windy in the morning, now calm, sunny, and almost hot. All the pioctures to the right were taken after lunch, the top left one (small image, large) showing a view out the gorge, nicely lit in the afternoon sun: this was taken at 3:45 or so. And in the top right one (small image, large), we’re on our way down to get an upwards view of the bridge. Middle row: left, again looking out the gorge, but showing the cliff very nicely (small image, large); right, the bridge shows very nicely, and you can see our parador as the leftmost building visible at the top of the cliff (small image, large). Bottom row, the left picture shows the gazebo out at the edge of the cliff, and if you look at the large image, you can see very clearly the platform that’s built out over the abyss. (small image)
The last picture shows Mark occupied with the task that we finished every day with: reviewing the day’s pictures. You can see just a bit of the elegance of our room (small image, large) there.
But our day was hardly over: around eight in the evening, Mark was feeling first queasy, then uncomfortable, then sick, with every possible unpleasant stomach and intestinal malady. I think he was up till about four in the morning, tossing and turning in bed when he wasn’t hovering over the plumbing in the bathroom. I was completely unaffected, except for a couple of twinges, which I put down to sympathetic pain, and we concluded that since the venison at lunch was the only thing he had had that I hadn’t, it must have been that that was the source of his difficulty. At breakfast, he was cautious, sticking mostly to tea and toast, our mothers’ universal belly-calmer, but hungry, which was a good enough sign. Fortunately, no such misadventure befell us throughout the rest of the trip.
Go to the next day’s page; to the previous day’s page.
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