Smugglers in the Ronda Hills

Manuel Barrón is considered to be the great Romantic Andalusian landscape artist. His paintings of the local landscape make him the main follower of the concepts of David Roberts and Jenaro Pérez Villaamil. Together with these influences, he introduced the characteristics of Andalusian costumbrism using the picaresque and picturesque aspects of the human figure. The desire for the escapism and evasion of the Romantic landscape is translated into the picturesqueness and exoticism derived from the values of the local common people, provided by the vision of foreign travellers, especially of smugglers and bandits, who were poeticised as heroes surrounded by the legends of Romantic myth. In particular, the part of the Ronda mountains depicted here was one of the most travelled at the time. As part of the Camino inglés, travellers inevitably chose this route when moving between Gibraltar and Ronda, passing through Gaucín, to go to Granada, despite the fact that it was the most dangerous and longest route.