Santiponce is not a very exciting place.
Yet buried in all of this is a Roman theatre.
It's completely blocked off and you're not allowed in it, but you can walk all around the outside.
We next headed to the main Italica site, paid the admission and headed in.
"Hello?! Can somebody please give me a hand? Hahahahah. I slay myself. No seriously, come on in!"
The best preserved building here is, clearly, the amphitheatre.
Fortunately, the sun came out to make all the photos look nice again.
The hordes of schoolkids were being dragged around the site.
There are a couple of places you can go inside and look at stuff.
Here is some ancient Roman text. Bit hard to read, sorry.
There have been some heavy rains this year, so everything's a bit waterlogged.
As ever, mosaics abound aplenty. I can't believe this stuff lasts 1700 years...
We headed out to see the rest of the old town. It's pretty roughed up (most of this land was used for farming until pretty recently), but there is still a bunch to see.
This is a huge housing complex called el Edificio de la Exedra.
It turns out that often they have no idea what a particular building was used for, so when they find anything inside it that's identifiable, they just call it by that name ...
More ancient mosaics.
This is the house of birds.
It has pillars.
Pillars
And mosaics of birds.
This building complex was probably part of the Forum complex in town.
We next headed out to the ancient Roman baths, where you can actually still see the little aqueducts they used to feed water into the place.
We eventually got back into the car and headed deeper into the mountains of Andalucia.
There are lots of rolling hills and fields around here. It's pretty sweet.
The first town we found ourselves in was Arcos de la Frontera, complete with ancient church and castle (the latter is now a Parador I believe).
We didn't really feel like stopping too much, so we just continued on.
We found ourselves quite high up in the mountains pretty quickly ... They get as high as over 2000m (like 6500').
This is the town of Benaocaz, nestled in the mountains here. Cute.
Continuing on, we found ourselves near the town of Grazalema, which was also pretty cool, and looked like a vacation place for people seeking to avoid the summer heat (it gets pretty brutal here in July and August).
Donkey!
We saw a tonne of these trees, and only finally figured it out near the end of the trip -- they're cork trees, and the bark is harvested every ten years, leaving them somewhat ... well ... naked looking afterwards.
Continuing on towards Ronda, we found ourselves in valleys with lots of rocks and grass.
Not much good for agriculture, they end up being used as pasture land for sheep. Thousands and thousands and thousands of sheep.
Valleys and towns abound aplenty.
We finally arrived in Ronda and got situated in our Parador. It's right on the cliff next to the main gorge in town, the 100m (330') Tajo Gorge. w0w!
The views of the countryside out there are pretty cool too.
Looking down on the homes below.
People have actually tried to build homes and stuff down there. Cool.
This is the Puente Nuevo over the gorge. How cool is that???
We wandered around the town for a while in the evening twilight, and just enjoyed what we could. Not a lot was open any more, but we'd be seeing it all on the morrow.
Looking back at the Parador.
They light the bridge up at night for some spectacular views.
It was right about now that the lady from the hotel came to kick me off the walkway -- they close it down at night (probably for the security of the guests).
Hella-cool town.