Mantle in the Mountains - Day 4

Jan and I now know Ronda's shopping streets pretty well - we were looking for a gift for our leader, Tom, and thought that a "proper" Spanish pocket knife would fit the bill so we set out up one street and down the next looking for the right sort of shop. The chap in the one ferreteria we found didn't have anything very exciting but directed us to a "proper" knife shop.... which unfortunately was closed for the day. That exhausted the main town so we headed over the Puente Nuevo into the old town, getting a great view of a parade in passing - bandits, mules etc. It was like stepping back into the pages of Washington Irving's Tales of the Alhambra!

Luckily we found a really good quality, hand-made knife quite quickly so, that done, enjoyed the rest of the morning - though it was a shame we missed the walk down the gorge... must do that next time!

After lunch we set out to the west of Ronda, turning off towards Montejaque and stopping first for an overview of the geology around the embalse.

Montejaque embalse - dry when we were there

The grey rocks are Jurassic limestone on the edge of the Sierra de Grazalema and have been folded until nearly vertical. We are on the edge of the Ronda Basin which underwent late stage extension in the Late Miocene (Tortonian/Messinian) and is partly filled with a lot of Neogene fan and distal basin fill deposits. The Taco fan delta is at the edge of the Ronda Basin.
The scenery here is upland pasture on the flysch between the knolls of limestone. The flysch is marine, but includes frosted Neo-Numidian sand grains from the Sahara area. On the whole the flysch is muddy and poorly exposed, but does have occasional sandstone beds and some olistostrome. Unclear if it is unconformable or whether there is a structural contact.
We drove on down the gorge below the dam, turning right up a track before the village of Montejaque where we found marly limestone as seen the previous day, and had an opportunity to examine the limestone in a small quarry.

The gorge below the dam

The limestone/olistostrome and flysch scenery

Exposure of marly limestone

Limestone outcrops near the hilltop but the grassy slope below that is where there is a flysch covering

View east towards Ronda, sitting on its crags of fan deposits at the edge of the Ronda Basin