Casa del Rey Moro

From the Gardens of Cuenca, the palace you see clinging to the cliffside, with its pale façades and terraced gardens cascading toward the bottom of the ravine, is the Casa del Rey Moro—literally the “House of the Moorish King”… even though no Moorish king ever lived there. The building you’re looking at is actually an eighteenth-century residence, created long after the Reconquest in a Neo-Mudéjar style that imitates Islamic architecture and appealed greatly to the Romantic travellers of the time. What is genuinely medieval here is not the house itself but what lies beneath it: an extraordinary water mine carved in the fourteenth century during the reign of King Abomelic, spiralling downward in rock-cut steps all the way to the Guadalevín River below. During sieges, Christian slaves would climb up and down this dizzying shaft, filling water skins by the river and hauling them back to the city—an effort that allowed Ronda to hold out far longer behind its walls. Local legend insists the mine once hid the treasures of the Moorish king, though that belongs more to folklore than to archaeology. Above ground, the terraced gardens you see were designed in 1912 by the French landscape architect Jean Claude Nicolas Forestier, who created a Mediterranean garden of fountains, stairways, geometric hedges and spectacular viewpoints over the gorge, blending Moorish inspiration with French formal design. Today, when open, you can wander through these gardens and then descend the mine’s long staircase to the river—a demanding but unforgettable experience that lets you feel, quite literally, both the ingenuity and the hardships of life in Ronda during the Muslim kingdoms. From where you stand, just keep in mind this double reality: the romantic palace clinging to the cliff on one side, and behind it, an impressive defensive and hydraulic system without which the city might never have survived its enemies.