A visitor's centre, some car parks, a long low mound and a view across a plain of wheat: the Antequera dolmens site does not look like much from the approach road, and then you step inside Menga and your sense of proportion rearranges itself. This stop is the formal gateway to the complex, a mile or so from the old town, and from here you can see the shape of the landscape that the prehistoric builders chose, with the strange rocky mountain called the Peña de los Enamorados rising to the northeast.
The first thing to know is how old it all is. Menga, Viera and the tholos of El Romeral were put up in the Neolithic and Copper Age, which is to say well before Stonehenge reached its final form and long before Rome. Menga's capstones, each of enormous weight, were brought from a quarry some distance away and set on huge uprights, and a deep shaft inside the chamber has never been fully explained. El Romeral, a couple of kilometres off, is different again: a corbelled chamber of small stones, like a beehive, with a second tiny room at the back.
Riding here is easy but not boring. From the Ronda side you drop out of the sierra onto the high plain of the Antequera depression, a crossroads where the main routes between Málaga, Granada, Córdoba and Seville have met for two thousand years. Roads are straight and fast in the valley, with limestone ridges standing up on the horizon, and the El Torcal range to the south, with its stacked rock towers, is worth a detour in good weather. Between November and February morning frost is not unusual on the plain, and in midsummer the heat sits on the road from noon.
Antequera is a big enough town, with more than forty thousand people, to have all the fuel, food and car-parking you could want. Try a late breakfast with the local mollete bread, olive oil and tomato, and if you have time walk up to the Moorish fortress, which looks over a cluster of churches and baroque towers. Take water to the site in summer, because there is little shade between the entrance and the chambers, and look into a ticket slot for the day before you arrive.