Setenil de Las Bodegas: White Village Under the Rock

‘What? Senetil? Where is that?’

That was the driver’s question when I told him we wanted to go to the village next to Ronda, to see the famous cliffs hanging over the streets.

Little did I know, I was messing up the village name every time I was talking about it.

After pointing it on the map, I stood corrected and found my way to Setenil de las Bodegas (with a taxi as we didn’t rent a car). The drive was something out of an Italian action movie with olive plantations lining the roads and our driver speeding through the curves like his life depended on it.

I did not have high expectations as Setenil is a very small village, and all the tourists descent here just to get a snap of the famous cliffs which stretch through only two short streets in the village.

We joined them on the quest and after getting lost right after stepping out of the taxi, we found the cliffs hanging over a line of busy restaurants.

It feels little strange sitting under such a massive rock, like a lizard hiding from the midday sun. The cliffs are huge and I couldn’t get my head around how they could just hang like that, without any obvious support.

From the first moment we arrived, it was painfully obvious that all the crowds sitting in the restaurants were tourists, mostly Spanish.

We had a quick drink and tried to locate a restaurant that didn’t have ‘tourist rip off’ written all over it.

We got lucky and found a place where I had the best meal of the whole Ronda trip, and I still talk about it today. The restaurant was called Cafeteria Bar Sol y Sombra (location here).

Visiting Setenil is certainly an experience in itself, but don’t set your expectations too high.

There is not much else to see or do, so it’s a good stop-over for lunch if you’re passing the area of want to see what’s outside of Ronda.

I will leave you to enjoy the virtual tour through the photos and will follow up with more from my trip to Ronda in the next couple of posts.

PS – the village streets are pretty narrow and it gets busy during the summer, so plan accordingly if you want to avoid the crowds.

Its almost impossible to take a photo without any other people in it, unless you stay in the village and head here early in the morning.

If you want to see what the area looks like on a busy day, check this blog.