Ronda's old town features a famous bridge over a deep gorge, a bullring that regards itself as the birthplace of modern bullfighting, and a string of elegant parks overlooking the valley below and the misty ridges lined up beyond. Here, you can see the track leading back to Montejaque and reflect with awe on the superhumans who hike it. In the new town, rectangular blocks of asphalt and stained plaster house the grocery stores and parking garages that support the touristy appendix of the old.
The bullring, for a fee, will let you walk around in the great sand circle, look over the bull stalls and guillotine gates, and view exhibits on the history of bullfighting, freak survivor of the old bloodsports and lonely descendent of ancient rites. A bullfighting ring is the most alien place in Spain. It's also interesting to look over the matador outfits and contemplate radical changes to your personal style.
Unexpectedly, the bullring has an adjoining dressage ground, where a young woman with a squeaky saddle quacks in elegant ovals on a prancing black horse and large placards try to explain the sport to tourists who know it only from post-Olympics stand-up comedy routines.
I knew the Ronda train station as a gloomy place of heavy rain and anxiety, but it's actually a gloomy place of mild boredom with a surprisingly busy cafe. The monitors on the train, which is only moderately late, show a closed-captioned period drama about disabled children, and it's exciting to try to follow the plot based on the 40% of the dialogue I understand. At the time of arrival in Cordoba, things seem to have been going well, but it also may have all been a dream in the mind of a killer shark.
My place in Cordoba was a little apartment by the Guadalquivir -- a lazy, wide, olive river -- on a street that, like all the streets of Cordoba, is lined with orange trees heavy with fruit. The oranges are inedible, but you still want to furtively fill a sack and run off and find a use for them later. What a chance was lost when decorative oranges were chosen over sweet ones; this could have been a post-orange-scarcity society where people pluck fruit from the trees on their way to work. The apartment feels luxurious after the cramped shower stalls and narrow beds and confused multilingual check-in discussions of the village inns. I washed all my clothes, which were disgusting, used a microwave, and felt like an emperor.
Cordoba is a lively old place. The squares and the riverside restaurants that block the sidewalks with their patios are jammed not with tourists but with locals, and the plazas are filled with Christmas markets and giant Santa statues with Neanderthal faces.
The Roman bridge is the navel of Andalusian tourism. It's a graceful and striking thing itself, it very usefully lets you get across the river, it overlooks patches of trees and rushes popular with herons and ducks, and it's a variety show of tourist nonsense and local oddness. A keyboardist and an accordionist -- who arranged the Macarena for the accordion, and can anything be done to stop them? -- and a young man who just about knows how to juggle, vendors selling bouncing balls on strings, a group pasting poetry on the bollards and photographing themselves and hugging each other, and, on Sunday, groups of chanting soccer fans. Just off the far end, young women in llama-themed outfits stand in a circle and sing. The leading theory is that this is also possibly somehow soccer-related.
At the business end of the bridge is the Mezquita, the mosque-cathedral whose fields of striped columns are the city's most-photographed sight. They are enclosed by rows of Catholic shrines and themselves enclose a post-reconquest nave and grand altar lavishly built up in layers of different styles. There's a heavy smell of incense, tour guides chant explanations, a cleaning cart stands by the altar to remind viewers of photographs what tourist sites are really like, and a toddler screams for papa until everyone else wants to find her papa -- or any papa she might find acceptable -- just as badly. But it's all well worth putting up with.
The rest of the old town is a business of crenellated sandstone walls and towers and cobbled alleys, some that cars seem to clear by inches and some passable only by scooters. There are brown churches, huge wooden gates with human-sized doors cut out, palm trees, old buildings of pitted stone joined to modern ones of white plaster, and horse-drawn carriages for the convenience of lost 19th-century aristocrats and tourists who insist on the jerkiest and smelliest ways of getting about.
On Sunday, it's blindingly sunny and so hot that some Spanish men take off their puffy jackets. In the evening, the Christmas markets are alive, lit by spotlights, blinding as the daytime sun, that strike the Santas' brow ridges and cast their cannibal faces into shadow. There's a lively trade in cotton candy, children run around and go on gentle rides, a crowd sings and waves phone flashlights around a newly-married couple emerging from a church, and tour guides pedantically explain that Neanderthal Santa's cranial capacity was actually larger than those of modern Santas.
In the largest plazas, crowds mill around, possibly waiting for the carnies working behind barriers of striped tape to finish erecting midway rides. Sunday-night-stroll clothes are rather stylish and formal by North American standards. A young woman walks out of a grocery store wearing a gown and stole, and she is not overdressed. For men, a collared shirt seems to be the minimum acceptable, and only my age prevents me from being thought a ragamuffin.
The morning I left, there was applause coming from out in the street -- not for me, which was a relief, because I didn't feel I fully deserved it, but for runners in the Cordoba Marathon. How complicated would that make the walk to the train station? Only moderately, and I had a backup plan, anyway, which was to duck under the tape and pretend to be a runner in a stupid costume. The marathon and I took separate routes but met at intervals. There were patchy crowds all along the streets, cheering happily, except for a homeless man and his dog, who watched sourly from the bed they'd erected at the side of a usually-quiet street. Members of a marching band -- before their show, after their show, or having given up early on marching the marathon -- drifted with their instruments to cafes and viewpoints.
The two main points of interest about the train station were a woman in a tracksuit leaning out of her train to smoke while it was stopped -- a practice we'd learn more about on the way to Madrid -- and a dusty archaeological enclosure by the platforms, which was the site of Maximianus's palace. On the train itself, I had to kick out of my seat a woman who had spread makeup and brushes across the row and was working away with a handheld mirror. I'm sorry, but my preening is just as important as hers. The train bewildered us all by not just being on time in Cordoba, but by arriving early into Madrid.
