Exploring Andalusia's String of Pearls

CASARES, Spain — As our car raced down the steep cobblestone streets of Jimena de la Frontera, my daughter began to shriek.

"I'm sorry for anything I ever said!" Becca screamed. "We're gonna die!"

It certainly seemed that way. Half a block ahead, without warning, the road turned into a staircase, and we were headed straight for it. The bars at the top of the steps would slow our rental car, but they wouldn't stop it.

I swerved to the right, prayed as we squeezed through a narrow passage, then shot down another narrow street and out into a lovely plaza lined with benches, strolling Spaniards and a row of orange trees below a pink domed tower. The crenelated Moorish castle we had just explored, mostly in ruins but for the walls and a glorious arch, loomed over the white-walled village.

We slowed and stopped and caught our breath.

Which is what one does in these small towns in Andalusia, the southernmost region of Spain. Northern Andalusia has the wonderful cities of Seville, Granada and Cordoba. The southern coast, along the Mediterranean between Gibraltar and Malaga, is, in most cases, grossly overdeveloped.

This mountainous region between the two, called the Serrania de Ronda, is a wonderful tangle of gorges, cork forests, vast rocky peaks and startlingly white villages that glow in the distance like a cluster of pearls.

Much of the charm of this area is not about visiting museums but about participating in the flow of daily life. Each day we slowed down, as though the quicksilver of modern life were being replaced by the sweet dessert wine made in nearby Manilva.

My mother lives in this part of the world, about a mile below the white-walled village of Casares, up in the hills behind the beach town of Estepona. An American, she came here 30 years ago, fell in love with the area and never left.

I bring Becca here every year. We revisit some towns (we never miss Ronda), but each year we try to explore at least one "new" white village.

That's how we happened last August to be in Jimena, a place we will remember if only because we didn't end up as a memorial plaque on one of its whitewashed walls.

Parts of Andalusia were inhabited 50,000 years ago. From 25,000 BC on, humans left traces of their presence in cave paintings, which you can still see on Route C339 near Ronda at the Cueva la Pileta.