My Spanish Escapades: "I wonder if the birds know how lucky they are to live here?"

On Saturday I took an impromtu day trip to Ronda, Spain, with Allison, Mckenzie and Matt. We all met up at Plaza del Duque at 9:15 AM to catch the 10 AM bus, there was one earlier but Matt said that we would've all been mad at him if he'd bought those tickets, which is true. The bus ride took about two hours and it was a beautiful drive, the only annoying part was the guy sitting next to us, he kept laughing really loudly at the show he was watching on his iPad. I never knew someone doing a "quiet" activity could be so loud.

Where Ronda is located.

After a quick bathroom break the first thing we did when we got to Ronda was buy a map, we didn't know it but the map came in three languages, English, Spanish and French. We accidentally picked one written in French, of all of the choices we managed to pick the only one we couldn't read, but luckily the store owner let us exchange it. So with a map that we could read we set off for our day long adventure. We had such good luck all day, we kept just stumbling upon places that we wanted to visit. First we visited the Puente Nuevo, or new bridge, which was built in the 18th century so it isn't so new.

Puente Nuevo.

We spent some time on the bridge and then we saw that there were people in the bottom of the canyon, immediately we wanted to be down there too, but we couldn't figure out how to get there. Matt yelled down to some people in the canyon and they told us we had to go to La casa del Rey Moro, so we went crossed the bridge and found out that we had to pay 4 euro to go through the old mines to get to the bottom of the canyon, it was well worth it!

The canyon we went down into.

Canyon reflecting in the water.

Something was really funny, but look how blue the water is.

We walked into the place where you buy tickets to get to the bottom of the canyon and the woman selling them asked us "are you the four people who were yelling about how to get down into the canyon?", we said yes we were, which she thought was hilarious. We walked down through the abandoned mine, which was very cool. There was one room that was built so that you could stand in one corner and whisper and the person in the opposite corner could hear it as if you were standing next to them. On the way down through the mine there were a lot of little jut outs where you could look down into the canyon and Matt was leaning out and dropped his sunglasses on another tourists' head, oops! The water at the bottom of the canyon was so clear and blue it looked fake, it was amazing.

Stopped at one of the scenic outlooks.

After we trekked back up from the canyon we were hungry so we decided to go have tapas for lunch. The first place we went was an adventure to say the least, we ordered a mixed plate of tapas to share and didn't know what 75% of them were, and none of them were very good. Disappointed and still hungry we decided to go "tapa-hopping" and headed to another tapas place. This one was much tastier, I had some fabulous spinach croquettes and we liked everything that we tried there.

We spent an hour or so wandering around the town of Ronda, we visited the Plaza de toros and a few scenic outlooks, and I found my new house. From one of the outlooks we saw a waterfall and I was determined to get closer to it. So we started off and found a path that seemed to lead to the waterfall, we got a great view of the countryside. Then I found another little path that was slightly off the beaten track, we did some slightly more extreme hiking, at one point we weren't sure how we would get back up to the top. We finally ended up at the foot of the water fall, at a private pool with lots of mini waterfalls, that seemed like it didn't get many vistors. Words can't describe how gorgeous this place was, we stayed there for over an hour, throwing rocks off the edge, dipping our feet in the water and just relaxing. We were so disappointed when it was time to hike back to the bus, but it was a wonderful day trip and Ronda definitely near the top of the list of my favorite places in Spain.