In my last travel diary, I wrote about the amazing 18th-century New Bridge of Ronda, and how the water mills below it had their very own walls, showcasing how important those were for the city. Now, I’ll take you on a small tour around the actual city walls of Ronda.
Ronda, despite being a relatively small town, was an important strategic asset due to how impregnable it was as a city fortress, and how it controlled everything that passed over between the surrounding plains. These areas also include plenty of pasturelands and are good at growing vegetables and cereals. Roda was so hard to take that it was one of the last bastions of Muslim rule to fall on the Iberian Peninsula.
While it was almost impossible to capture with a regular siege, just take a look at the picture above and tell me that you would even dare to climb those walls. You don’t even have a place to set up a ladder. If climbing up and down the city is hard enough today, even for someone relatively young and fit like myself, I can only imagine how much of a daunting task it would be for an undernourished soldier with full gear on.
However, once cannons became a mainstay in European warfare, and said cannons were brought to bear during the siege of Ronda, it only took the town 5 days before it surrendered to the Castilian King, Ferdinand III, mainly because of the intense bombardment the Castilian troops placed the city under. First, they fired on the city from several positions, one with cannons and culverins, the other with trebuchets. Once, part of a wall was destroyed by the cannons, Castilian soldiers stormed in, consolidated their positions, and the cannons were moved into the city to fire against the inner walls of the Alcazar (the fortress). Not only that, but the main water source of the city was captured, and with some major parts of it set alight by fires, the inhabitants surrendered under the condition that they would be spared, and so they were.
While on my walks during the walls, me and my wife met a lovely elderly American couple who were celebrating their retirement, and while we were helping them climb down the walls, we struck up a conversation, and we talked about several subjects, one of them was the time the walls were built (early medieval period), and why the steps were as tall as they are (because it’s cheaper and because it makes climbing the walls extremely hard), and he seemed so surprised. This also led me to another conversation, which was about the difference in how we look at time frames in history. I was talking about how the Ronda Bridge is “recent history”, but for our American counterparts, the Bridge started being built 24 years before the American Revolutionary War started. The walls predate America’s independence by a millennium, which is even more astonishing. Really puts things in perspective once you think about it that way.
Anyway, it was a very nice chat, with some lovely folk.
I’ll leave you with some other pictures that I have taken from my trip to Ronda, including the outside and inside of a tower, a passageway, and a POV perspective from what it was like to be on top of one of the gates looking down on the entrance.
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