A town of the Serranía de Ronda, split by the Tajo gorge of the Guadalevín. It is identified with pre-Roman Arunda; after the Muslim conquest it was the capital of the kura of Takurunna and it preserves an extensive medieval historic centre.
Acinipo coins bearing a bunch of grapes, Roman Republican period (c. 2nd–1st century BC); modern vineyards revived since the late 20th centuryAcinipo, the city that minted grape bunches
A few kilometres from Ronda, on the plateau of Ronda la Vieja, lie the ruins of Acinipo, a pre-Roman and Roman city with the right to mint coins. Many of its coins bear a bunch of grapes, and from this arose the local tradition that Acinipo means “land of wines”. Historians are more cautious: the name probably predates Rome, but the Romans would have read it as if it came from the Latin acinus, grape berry, just as they put a bear on the coins of Urso. Whether a pun or a memory of real vineyards, the bunch of Acinipo is today the emblem that the winemakers of the Serranía use to claim a tradition that, after phylloxera, reinvented itself with the bodegas born at the end of the 20th century.
Alive today: Ronda is the heart of the Serranía de Ronda subzone of the DOP Sierras de Málaga and is home to some twenty bodegas, many of them open to visitors: Turismo de Ronda publishes its own list of bodegas and wine tourism. Among them stand out F. Schatz, run by a family of German winegrowers, and Descalzos Viejos, housed in the former convent of the Discalced Trinitarians beside the Tajo gorge.