The first bridge across Ronda's gorge lasted six years. Built in 1735 in eight months, it collapsed in 1741 and killed roughly fifty people. Its replacement, the Puente Nuevo, took forty-two years — 1759 to 1793 — and still carries traffic 98 metres above the Guadalevín river. That single span is the fixed point of every White Villages and Ronda Guided Day Tour from Seville, and the reason a town of 34,000 people draws visitors from three continents. Ronda sits on a limestone shelf that El Tajo gorge cuts almost in half. West and north of it, across the provinces of Málaga and Cádiz, lie the pueblos blancos: Zahara de la Sierra under its twelfth-century Nasrid keep, Grazalema at the wettest measured point in Spain, Olvera stacked beneath a castle and a neoclassical church, Setenil de las Bodegas wedged under the rock overhangs of the Río Trejo. Several carry the suffix de la Frontera. It marks a real border — the line held between Nasrid Granada and Castile for more than two centuries. The whitewash itself is lime, reapplied each year, antiseptic and heat-reflective long before it was picturesque. Ronda's monuments sit close together on the mesa. The Plaza de Toros, finished in 1785 for the Real Maestranza de Caballería, holds 5,000 spectators behind 66 sandstone columns and remains one of the oldest bullrings in Spain. The Baños Árabes, built at the end of the thirteenth century where the Arroyo de las Culebras met the old tanneries, keep their star-shaped skylights and horseshoe arches intact. A reconstructed noria beside them shows how the stream was lifted to fill the tanks. Pueblos blancos tours out of the Andalusian capital rarely cover them all; White Villages and Ronda Guided Day Tour from Seville tours differ mainly in which two or three villages they add to the mesa. Writers noticed early. Rainer Maria Rilke worked at the Hotel Reina Victoria over the winter of 1912 and called Ronda the place he had been looking for. Hemingway borrowed the gorge for a killing in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Orson Welles asked for his ashes to stay here, and they do, on a farm outside town. None of that made the landscape; it only recorded it. The stone was quarried locally, the balconies iron, the roofs Roman-pattern tile, and the same builders' vocabulary repeats in every village along the Sierra de Grazalema. A well-judged White Villages and Ronda Guided Day Tour from Seville tour reads as a single argument about limestone, water and frontier, told in four or five settlements.