This was our second bus trip in Spain. On the first one we noticed that the driver had a colleague who travelled with him and we didn’t really pay too much attention to it, but it happened again on this trip. The driver’s companion this morning did not draw breath for the entire trip, almost two hours. Perhaps his job was to keep the driver awake? If anyone knows, I’d love to find out why they have this colleague with them.

Thankfully this morning it was much cooler, so after our short taxi ride to the Prado San Sebastián, we enjoyed a coffee and some people watching until it was time to board. There was quite an impressive security regime in place here.

These three guards were very heavily armed, two with hand guns and one of them with an automatic assault rifle.

We watched them question two separate people while we were waiting, and during that time a different police van drove through the station. Unsure what they were looking for, but it was a bit unnerving.

Anyway, the bus trip was very pleasant, mostly through yellow and brown landscapes of ripe or recently-harvested wheat crops and ripe sunflower crops.

As we came closer to Ronda the landscape changed colour to the greens of olive groves climbing up steep slopes.

Once in Ronda, we quite easily found our apartment where we will spend the next week. It is about a ten minute walk from the main part of town and is beautifully air conditioned, which is good as the heat wave conditions are supposed to last another week.

Of course we headed straight to the Tourist Office to get Mick a map.

This church – Inglesia do Socorro – is located in the central plaza. It was built in 1956 on the site where there had once been a Muslim chapel.

After we had been given some good advice by the tourism officer, who spoke fabulous English, we had a quick look at two of the main attractions in Ronda – a view of the gorge and the New Bridge (Ponto Nuevo), although it didn’t look too new to me.


We then headed off to buy some necessary supplies and plan out our itinerary for the week. This place looks very cute and I am sure we will enjoy our time here.