Ronda, the white villages, and a table for one

A short drive inland from the high-rise coast of the Costa del Sol, the land folds up into mountains, and the towns change colour. They become white: whitewashed houses stacked on hillsides and ridges, with a church tower at the top and the remains of a Moorish castle somewhere nearby. These are the pueblos blancos, the white villages of Andalucía, and they are one of the best reasons to go to the south of Spain. They are also, for anyone travelling alone, surprisingly difficult to see properly. The buses are infrequent, the roads are steep, and a village of narrow lanes is a lonely place to eat dinner by yourself at ten at night, which is when the Spanish eat it.

This is where travelling on your own, but with a group of other people doing the same, starts to make sense.

Ronda, on the edge of the gorge

Ronda is the most dramatic of the hill towns, and possibly of any town in Spain. It sits on a plateau split in two by a gorge, El Tajo, more than a hundred metres deep, with the Guadalevín river at the bottom and sheer rock walls on either side. The two halves of the town are joined by the Puente Nuevo, the New Bridge, which is new only in the Spanish sense: it was finished in 1793, after about four decades of work, and it is built of the same honey-coloured stone as the cliff, so that from below it looks less like a bridge than a part of the gorge that decided to stay.

The views from the bridge and the clifftop paths are the reason most people come, and they are worth the crowds at midday. The town has other claims, too. Its bullring, finished in the 1780s, is one of the oldest in Spain, and Ronda is traditionally counted as one of the birthplaces of bullfighting on foot, whatever you think of it. Ronda also attracted foreign writers in the twentieth century, among them Rilke and Hemingway, and Orson Welles, whose ashes are buried on a farm nearby. It is a town that has always known how to impress a visitor.

Frigiliana, Nerja and Mijas

Frigiliana, in the hills above Nerja, is the white village most people imagine when they imagine one: steep lanes of cobbles set in patterns, pots of geraniums on every wall, and a jumble of houses in what was the Moorish quarter. It also has a darker history. In 1569 the Moriscos, Muslims who had been forcibly converted to Christianity, rose in revolt across the mountains of Granada, and one of the last battles was fought on the crag above Frigiliana. Ceramic panels on the walls of the old town tell the story, street by street.

Nerja, below it on the coast, is a pleasant resort with a promenade called the Balcony of Europe, built out on a headland over the sea, and a set of caves in the hills behind, discovered in 1959 by a group of local boys, which turned out to hold prehistoric paintings. Mijas is the white village that the Costa del Sol made famous: a pretty hill town above Fuengirola, with long views down to the sea and, for many years, a line of donkey taxis waiting in the square, which have become as much a part of the place as its church.

The white is not only for the look of it. Whitewash made of lime reflects the summer heat, and lime was long believed to help keep disease at bay. Today it is simply the custom of the place, and a village that let it lapse would look as if it had lost its nerve.

The case for company

Travelling alone has obvious pleasures: your own pace, your own choices, nobody to negotiate with over lunch. It also has obvious costs, and in the south of Spain some of them are practical. Hill towns without a car mean timetables and long waits. Spanish meals are sociable, long and late. And the single supplement, the extra charged for a room on your own, can make the whole thing expensive.

Just You runs tours only for people travelling on their own, which changes the atmosphere in a quiet but important way. Nobody is the odd one out, because everybody is. There are people to share a table with in the evening, and just as importantly, there is no obligation to. The trips are organised around a base, with the villages visited by day and free time built in.

For those who would rather see the great cities too, a longer journey links Granada, Córdoba and Seville with Cádiz and the sherry town of Jerez before ending on the coast at Málaga.

When to go

The hill towns are at their best in spring, from March to May, when the countryside is green and flowering and the walking is easy, and again in October and November, when the light softens and the heat has gone. High summer in the interior is very hot, and Ronda at midday in August is a test of stamina rather than a pleasure. Those who like walking between the villages as well as visiting them might look at a walking trip through the mountains to Antequera and Granada, a different and more energetic way of seeing the same country.