The water mine
A rock stair descending from the house to the valley floor.
cloudsoup — CC BY 2.0 · Julia Kostecka — CC BY 2.0 · Parpadeo — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Fedoce1 (Fernando Domínguez Cerejido) — CC BY-SA 4.0
**A stair cut into the rock descending a hundred metres from the town to the valley floor — built to secure water under siege** — in the old quarter. ⚠ **The «water mine» is the object**: **some two hundred steps cut into the body of the cliff** running from inside the house down to the river — ⚠ **built in the 14th century**, **up which Christian captives carried water in skins on their shoulders**, **step by step**. ⚠ **This was Ronda's weak point**: **when the Catholic Monarchs besieged it in 1485 they targeted the mine** — ✅ **and its fall brought the town down**. ⚠ **The name misleads**: **no Moorish king lived here** — **the present house is 18th-century**, **and the name a later popular invention**. ✅ **Its terraced gardens** were designed by a Frenchman in 1912.
A rock stair descending from the house to the valley floor.
Gardens of 1912 on the cliff slope, with a view.
Gaps in the rock revealing the gorge as you go down.
Calle Santo Domingo 9, 29400 Ronda, Malaga, Spain
**By artillery and by cutting the water — not by storming the walls.** ✅ **The defence**: **Ronda sits on a vertical cliff on three sides** — ⚠ **it cannot be climbed and ladders cannot be raised against it**; **and it was reckoned among the strongest positions of the kingdom of Granada**, **its last western stronghold**. ✅ **What changed — artillery**: **by the 1480s the Castilian army had heavy siege guns** — ⚠ **cannon throwing stone shot that brought walls down from a distance**; **which altered the arithmetic of every fortress in Europe**. **A cliff protects against climbing, not against shot.** ✅ **And the decisive point — water**: ⚠ **a town on a cliff has no well** — **all its water came from the river below, raised through the «water mine»**. ✅ **So the besiegers targeted the mine and cut it** — ⚠ **and that ended the siege**: **a town without water surrenders within days whatever its walls**. ✅ **Ronda fell in May 1485** after a relatively short siege. ⚠ **Its fall had a large moral effect** — **others fortified themselves or surrendered**; ✅ **and Granada itself fell seven years later, in 1492**.
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