Ronda (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈronda]) is a municipality of Spain belonging to the province of Málaga, within the autonomous community of Andalusia.

Around the city are remains of prehistoric settlements dating to the Neolithic, including the rock art of Cueva de la Pileta.

Ronda was part of the Visigoth realm until 713, when it fell to the Umayyad troops, who named it Hisn al-Rundah ("Castle of Rundah") and made it the capital of the Takurunna province.

It was the hometown of the polymath Abbas ibn Firnas (810–887), an inventor, engineer, alleged aviator, chemist, physician, Muslim poet, and Andalusian musician.

Subsequently, most of the city's old edifices were renewed or adapted to Christian roles, while numerous others were built in newly created quarters such as Mercadillo and San Francisco.

In the early 19th century, the Napoleonic invasion and the subsequent Peninsular War caused much suffering in Ronda, whose inhabitants were reduced from 15,600 to 5,000 in three years.

Ronda's area became the base first of guerrilla warriors, then of numerous bandits, whose deeds inspired artists such as Washington Irving, Prosper Mérimée, and Gustave Doré.

Ronda's Romero family—from Francisco, born in 1698, to his son Juan, to his famous grandson Pedro, who died in 1839—played a principal role in the development of modern Spanish bullfighting.

In a family responsible for such innovations as the use of the cape, or muleta, and a sword especially designed for the kill, Pedro in particular transformed bullfighting into "an art and a skill in its own right, and not simply ... a clownishly macho preamble to the bull's slaughter".

[citation needed] The scene in chapter 10 of Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, describing the 1936 execution of Fascist sympathisers in a (fictional) village who are thrown off a cliff, is considered to be modeled on actual events of the time in Ronda.

In the first decades of the 20th century, the famous German poet Rainer Maria Rilke spent extended periods in Ronda, including three months at the Hotel Reina Victoria (built in 1906) between December 1912 and February 1913; his room remains to this day as he left it, a minimuseum of Rilkeana.

According to the hotel's publicity, Rilke wrote (though probably not in Spanish) He buscado por todas partes la ciudad soñada, y al fin la he encontrado en Ronda and No hay nada más inesperado en España que esta ciudad salvaje y montañera ("I have sought everywhere the city of my dreams, and I have finally found it in Ronda" and "Nothing is more startling in Spain than this wild and mountainous city.")