The white villages, Ronda and the Costa de la Luz

From the sierras to the Atlantic

The loop sets out from Jerez and climbs into the sierras, in the hills behind Cádiz and Málaga. Some twenty white villages follow one another, often huddled around a church and a castle. You leave the car at the entrance, walk up steep lanes, then take a narrow, winding road again to the next village. Near Jerez, Arcos de la Frontera is perched on the edge of a cliff, above the plain of the Guadalete.

Then the road drops down to the Atlantic. The Costa de la Luz is still lightly built. At Tarifa, the southernmost point of mainland Europe, Morocco lies in plain sight, fourteen kilometres away. The levante, the east wind, often blows hard here, which has made the town one of Europe’s kitesurfing capitals.

At Bolonia, a dune some thirty metres high closes off a bay. On the edge of the beach lie the Roman ruins of Baelo Claudia, a town that lived off tuna and garum, the Romans’ fish sauce. Further on stands the lighthouse on Cape Trafalgar. It was off this cape that Nelson defeated the Franco-Spanish fleet in 1805.

The women of Vejer wore the cobijado, a black veil that left a single eye showing, until it was banned in the 1930s. Throughout the region, the villages are whitewashed, hence their name, the pueblos blancos. The lime kept out the heat; it is still applied every year.

Between Ronda and Arcos, the Sierra de Grazalema is one of the rainiest places in Spain. Clouds from the Atlantic sometimes drop more than two metres of rain a year here. The sierra shelters a rare forest of Spanish fir, the pinsapo, a relic of the ice ages. Zahara de la Sierra, beneath the tower of its castle, looks down on a turquoise reservoir. At Setenil de las Bodegas, the houses are built under rock overhangs; some streets have a ceiling of stone. Its neighbour, Olvera, stretches along a ridge, with its castle at the top.

Ronda, the town on the ravine

Ronda sits on a plateau split in two by El Tajo, a gorge some hundred metres deep cut by the Guadalevín. The Puente Nuevo spans the gorge. Finished in 1793 after more than thirty years of work, it links the old Moorish town to the Mercadillo quarter.

The town has one of the oldest bullrings in Spain, the Real Maestranza, opened in 1785. Hemingway and Orson Welles came often. Welles’s ashes rest on an estate nearby.

What not to miss

1. 1The Puente NuevoRonda’s bridge, to be seen from below as well, from the path that drops into the gorge.
2. 2Arcos de la FronteraAn old town perched on the edge of a cliff, above the plain of the Guadalete.
3. 3Setenil de las BodegasHouses and streets built beneath the rock.
4. 4Baelo ClaudiaA Roman town on the edge of a white-sand beach.
5. 5Vejer de la FronteraWhite lanes and a view over the Atlantic.
6. 6CádizA city almost surrounded by the sea, founded by the Phoenicians three thousand years ago, as tradition has it.

The white villages in pictures

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Setenil de las Bodegas and its houses beneath the rock.

The Cádiz table

Jerez and Sanlúcar are the towns of sherry: fino, dry and pale; Sanlúcar’s manzanilla, which picks up a salty edge beside the estuary; oloroso, darker and more amber. You taste them in the bodegas, cellars built like cathedrals.

On the coast, bluefin tuna from the almadraba, caught in spring in fixed nets by a very old technique, has made the name of Barbate and Zahara de los Atunes. In Sanlúcar, people eat the estuary’s langostinos and tortillitas de camarones, thin fritters studded with tiny shrimp.