Ronda
There’s a small town north of our lodgings called Ronda. Gene found an article in the New York Times travel section written by a woman who visited there and listed the restaurants at which she dined. Hah, I just went to the NYT website and, although I read this story before we left, I didn’t realize that maybe I should have paid more attention to the first paragraph:
WE were running late the morning a friend and I drove to Ronda, a small town in Andalusia, and we had made a few wrong turns — an inevitable occurrence in southern Spain, where one finds accurate road signs about as often as one finds a green vegetable on one’s dinner plate.
I laughed out loud…but that kind of stuff is only funny in retrospect, long long after the pain of it has worn off. We made it to the town ok, but couldn’t seem to get out of it. Not funny. At all. We found out later that one of the route numbers had been changed and it wasn’t reflected on any of the maps we had or the GPS.
Anyway, she listed some attractions and restaurants at the end of her article. The food particularly attracted me
Taberna de Santo Domingo, Calle Santo Domingo, 2; phone and fax (34) 952-871-129. Small, homey restaurant with wood-beamed ceiling and very good cooking; terrific sliced Iberian cured meats, fresh marinated anchovies, sopa de ajo (garlic soup), revuelto de ajetes con gambas (scrambled eggs with shrimp and garlic shoots); braised oxtail. Dinner for two about $55 with wine
and my mouth was watering on the plane just thinking about the garlic soup and scrambled eggs. We were getting pretty despondent about this time with regard to being able to find anything, but by some freak accident, we found it and I did indeed dine on sopa de ajo and revuelto de ajetes con gambas. It was every bit as good as I’d dreamed. I found a recipe for the soup the day after we got home and it actually wasn’t bad at all. Good enough to stave off the inevitable cravings that will stand out in relief as the memory of this trip fades over time.
Ronda’s claim to fame is that it’s bisected by a large gorge
and is also home to the oldest bullfighting ring in the country. I’m not even going to entertain bullfighting. You can well imagine what I think of that culturally sanctioned cruelty.
Ernest Hemingway and Orson Wells spent their summers here and there’s a scene in For Whom the Bell Tolls where people are thrown off the cliffs of an Andalusian village. Supposedly scene is based on a true incident in which people were thrown off the cliffs pictured above.
No trip to Spain is complete without sighting a relic from the Inquisition:
Neat in a really creepy way, huh? There was an entire Inquisition museum here, but we didn’t go in.
