A Visit to Málaga and Ronda

Goretty Chavez is PRESHCO’s official blogger for the Spring 2019 semester. Goretty is a psychology major from Wellesley College, and she is spending the entire academic year in Spain.

This past weekend I went on an excursion to Málaga and Ronda with PRESHCO. I actually visited Málaga last semester with some of my peers, but we only went to the beach so I didn't get to see much of the city. This time around it definitely was not beach weather, unfortunately, but it was nevertheless a good trip.

We left Saturday morning and it was about a two-hour bus ride to Málaga. We were given all day to explore the city on our own, with the only requirement being that we visited at least two museums, which I appreciated because that way I could choose what I wanted to see. A couple of us went to go see the Picasso Museum, which I was excited about because I had been wanting to visit since the last time I was in Málaga.

During our orientation trip, we visited the Picasso museum in Barcelona which included a lot of Picasso's earlier works. They were great paintings, but it's not really the kind of paintings you think of when you think of Picasso. I enjoyed the paintings at the Picasso museum in Málaga a lot more. Also, there was a temporary exhibit on Olga Khokhlova, a Russian ballet dancer and Picasso's first wife.

I loved the fact that this exhibit allowed the audience to get to know Olga as a person and not just as a subject of many of Picasso's paintings. The exhibit included a lot of her photographs and letters which give the audience an insight into the history of her family, her background, and her career as a dancer. It even included some home videos of her that showed her smiling and spending time with her son. Picasso hardly, if at all, portrayed her as happy, so it was nice to see this side of her.

It probably took us about two hours to see the whole museum, so afterward we were, naturally, very tired and hungry. Somehow the whole group, including those who had not gone to the museum with us, ended up eating at the same vegetarian museum. I had some of my favorite Spanish foods for lunch, paella and potaje de lentejas, along with sangria; it was very delicious.

Afterward, some people went for ice cream, but I decided to hold off on the dessert for the time being and went with one of my peers to the wine museum. Unfortunately, when we arrived we realized it was closed. Thus, we decided to go to Carmen Thyssen Museum. I really loved this museum because the focus was on 19th century Spanish paintings, with the majority of them portraying life in Andalusia. Several of the paintings were about Seville, which I particularly enjoyed since it is one of my favorite Spanish cities. A lot of the paintings portrayed patios and ferias.

By the time we finished seeing all the paintings, we had about an hour and a half left before we had to meet the rest of the group at the bus and head to Ronda. Therefore, we went to go buy some ice cream, (I got an ice cream sandwich), and souvenirs. I collect pins from every city I visit, my mom collects magnets, and my dad collects keychains, so I bought all three of those things. After we did that, we walked by the port before heading to the bus.

Port of Málaga

At this point, it was 6 p.m. and we headed to Ronda. That night I was so tired that I only left the hotel to go eat dinner. A friend and I went to a bar and had some tapas for dinner. We each ate some mushroom croquetas and I had a pincho de gambas and tortita de camaron.

The next morning we had a tour of Ronda by one the PRESHCO tutors who is from there. She took us to the Puento Nuevo which is located over a gorge, a park where we could see some beautiful landscapes, a plaza de toros, and a church where we were able to climb to the top and enjoy some more beautiful views of the city. For lunch, I went to a bar for tapas and afterward we returned to Córdoba.

PRESHCOApril 8, 2019