Cádiz & Ronda
04 May 2025
Cádiz is effectively an island, connected to the mainland by two bridges and an isthmus to the south. The northern crossing, the Puente de la Constitución de 1812, is so graceful and so spectacularly beautiful, I’m surprised I’ve never heard about it before in the same way that San Francisco’s Golden Gate, Millau’s Viaduct, and even Newcastle’s Tyne Bridge are internationally famous. It’s also apparently the tallest bridge in the world, for any pub-quizzers reading this.
There’s bright Sunday morning sunshine and a cooling breeze blowing in from the Atlantic, making sitting in one of the many squares over morning coffee a simple pleasure and one to be repeated. It’s not particularly motorbike-friendly (is any city?) so we just tour the western flank, overlooking the ocean before crossing back to the mainland over the causeway. Later, I find Jerez Airport has a high-speed train linking historic Jerez with Cádiz, so it’s a prime candidate for a long weekend by air.
Picking our way across the Sierra de Grazalema National Park is entertaining, albeit slow, but at the end is Ronda and the famous, but unimaginably named Puente Nuevo (New Bridge). Dating from 1793, it replaced the one that collapsed into the Guadalevín River in 1741, killing 50 people in the process. This predecessor had the equally dull moniker of the Puente Viejo (Old Bridge), although both sound so much more exotic in Spanish.
The scale and ambition of the Puente Nuevo— given it that it was built nearly 300 years ago and took 34 years to complete— is humbling, and the architecture austere, beautiful, ominous, delicate, and forbidding simultaneously. Inevitably, the town is centred around the bridge to the point that even to get the classic view of it incurs a €5 charge.
Inevitably, Ronda is also rammed with tourists. I know, I know - I’m a tourist as well, but in my defence, I don’t wear a faded replica football shirt - bought as a younger and much slimmer man - stretched over an enormous beer gut, and stop every few minutes so I can take a selfie with some antiquity in the background. How on earth these people can think the resultant image is an improvement on the spectacle itself is mystifying. They’re like mongrel dogs, cocking their legs every few seconds, marking territory, and they get bloody everywhere.
The bar of the Casa Museo Don Bosco (a museum) is only accessible to those who have paid the €2.50 entry fee, and a Larrios (Spanish gin) and tonic is €9. Combined, they are sufficiently off-putting to these deluded oafs. And everybody else, it would seem, as the two of us are the sole customers. Definitely worth it for expansive views of the valley, the plain beyond, and town with, albeit only a tiny glimpse of the principal attraction.
