Ronda

Prehistoric people left the paintings of the Cueva de la Pileta, where human remains go back to the Neolithic. The town is traditionally identified with Arunda, a settlement of Iberians and Romans, while nearby Acinipo was one of the main Roman towns of the area. The Suebi took the town in the 5th century and the Byzantines in the 6th, when Acinipo was abandoned. Under Muslim rule it became the capital of the province of Takurunna, and the 9th-century polymath Abbas ibn Firnas, inventor and alleged aviator, came from here. As part of the Nasrid kingdom of Granada, Ronda held out until Ferdinand the Catholic took it on 22 May 1485 after a long siege.

The Christians settled the town while Muslims remained the majority in the surrounding countryside; later the moriscos turned to guerrilla warfare and banditry, and in the 19th century the bandits of the Serranía inspired Washington Irving, Prosper Mérimée and Gustave Doré. The new quarters of the Mercadillo and San Francisco grew in the 16th and 17th centuries, and the 18th century brought the Puente Nuevo and the bullring, both by José Martín de Aldehuela. French troops destroyed the castle as they withdrew during the Napoleonic wars.

In 1936 the military uprising failed in Ronda, which stayed loyal to the Republic, and violence followed; Hemingway's account of men thrown from a cliff in For Whom the Bell Tolls is thought to draw on events here. War brought emigration and depopulation. The railway, opened in 1892, had already made the town a summer escape for British officers from Gibraltar.

Ronda's Romero family — Francisco, born in 1698, his son Juan and his grandson Pedro, who died in 1839 — played a principal role in creating modern Spanish bullfighting, and the bullring of 1784 is one of the oldest and best preserved in Spain. Each September the Feria de Pedro Romero honours the most famous of them with the Corrida Goyesca, a bullfight in costumes inspired by Goya, in which bullfighters arrive by carriage. In 2009 Giorgio Armani designed the Goyesco costume for the bullfighter Cayetano Rivera Ordóñez.

The gorge, the bridge and the bandit legends made Ronda a fixture of Romantic travel writing, and the image has lasted. Ernest Hemingway and Orson Welles spent many summers in La Ciudad, and Welles said the town inspired his unfinished film of Don Quixote. The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke spent three months here over the winter of 1912–13, and his room is still kept as he left it.

Local devotion has its own traditions: the brotherhood of the Auroros sings the Canto de la Aurora in the early hours of the last Sunday of each month, and the Virgin of the Aurora is carried in procession at the end of September. Ronda is the capital of the Serranía de Ronda, the mountain district of small villages around it.

About 34,000 people were registered in the municipality in 2025. Ronda sits on a rocky plateau about 720 m above sea level, and the town is divided in two by the gorge of the Guadalevín, more than 100 m deep: La Ciudad on one side, the Mercadillo and San Francisco on the other.

The economy rests mainly on cultural and rural tourism. Ronda is one of the most visited towns in Andalusia, thanks to its monuments, its setting and its closeness to the resorts of the Mediterranean coast, and many visitors arrive on day excursions from the Costa del Sol; small shops and restaurants serve them. There are also some food-processing and furniture industries. The town's own savings bank long drove the local economy, until it merged into Unicaja in 1990.

Ronda is also the capital of the Serranía and heads its judicial district, and its station links the mountains with the coast and with Madrid.

Ronda's cooking is mountain food, built on simple dishes: tomato soup and garlic soup, stews of chickpeas or lentils, and asparagus and mushrooms. Other specialities are kid roasted in the mountain style, chorizo cooked in alcohol, and veal with potatoes, but the dishes that stand out come from hunting — partridge in the Tajo style and rabbit cooked the Ronda way. Pumpkin prepared a la rondeña is another traditional dish.

For sweets, Ronda is known for yemas del Tajo, egg-yolk confections, and for the cakes and biscuits made by the town's nuns. Breakfast is usually toast and café con leche.

The hills around the town also make wine. The Serranía de Ronda is a subzone of the Málaga wine denominations, and since the Sierras de Málaga label was created in 2001 small wineries here produce dry, high-altitude wines, in contrast with the province's traditional sweet Moscatel.