Jimena de la Frontera

Following Ronda, I stopped in another one of the “White Villages”, Jimena de la Frontera.

The train ride between Ronda and Jimena is breathtakingly beautiful. It’s worth doing just for the train ride alone! Unfortunately it’s not so easy to take good pictures from a moving a train, so here’s the best one:

Jimena clings to the side of a mountain; walking through the city is essentially just walking up or down the mountain. The train station is actually in the neighboring town of Los Ángeles; it was nearly 2.5 km from the station to my hotel!

The road between Los Ángeles and Jimena has public exercise equipment along the path. It was sunny and warm when I arrived, but noone seemed to want to take advantage of the clear weather to get in a workout.

The welcome sign for Jimena (self-styled as “a paradise between history and nature”) is almost as big as the town itself.

My photos would have you believe otherwise, but a very large portion of my time in Jimena looked like this:

It rained. A lot. I spent most of my not-quite-two-days there getting soaked (i.e. outside) or trying to dry off (i.e. inside). Jimena’s attractions are the Moorish castle atop the hill and hiking by the river, neither of which can be done inside. I never quite made it to the river (I was already wet enough), but I did spent a lot of time exploring the castle and the surrounding area. At one point I found myself uncomfortably close to the edge of a cliff with a thunderstorm moving in, so I abandoned my search for the access point to the Moorish Queen’s Bath (picture below) and made my way back to my warm, dry hotel room!