Puente Nuevo

Ronda's 'new bridge' was completed in 1793, after 40 years in construction and after the loss of the lives of 50 builders constructing the span bridging the 98m Tajo gorge. The bridge bisects Ronda into new town (mercadillo, 'little market') and old (La Ciudad). The project was first proposed by King Felipe V in 1735, to improve an earlier and impossibly steep 16h century bridge, the Puente Viejo, below the Puente Nuevo and, below that, the 12th century Moorish bridge by the Baños de los Arabes (Arab baths). Parts of the span column interiors were used as a prison and, later, as a bar, but are now a museum to prison and bridge. Both sides of the Civil War used the prison as a torture chamber for opposition captives, who it is said were sometimes dispatched from the balconied windows to the rocks below, although this is disputed as myth by some.Many Moorish towns and villages wasted away after the Christians put the final seal on the reconquest. Ronda was always too important for that. Its unsurpassed strategic advantages had attracted the dominant forces in the Peninsula since before Rome had an empire, and a simple change of overlord was not going to change things. Moorish buildings that had remained intact and appeared likely to stay that way barring deliberate demolition were simply commandeered and adapted by the incoming Christians.