f Ronda was mainly based on agricultural activities. In 1918 the city was the seat of the Assembly of Ronda, in which the Andalusianflag, coat of arms and anthem were designed.
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, ormuleta, 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."
Ronda was heavily affected by the Spanish Civil War, after which much of the population emigrated elsewhere. The famous 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 at the time in Ronda
