New Supeco store opens in Ronda

Two new retail spaces opened in Ronda last week. Paul Whitelock investigates…

Last week the former Supersol supermarket on the Polígono Industrial in Ronda re-opened as Supeco, a low-cost chain owned by Carrefour.

The French giant bought all the Supersol stores in Spain earlier this year.

The Ronda Supersol closed in August to get its makeover and re-opened as Supeco on 7 October.

The second store to open in the first week of October was the former San Rafael superstore which became China City for a few years and is now Brico Bazar Ronda.

This brings the total of Chinese shops in the City of Dreams to six, by my reckoning. No bull!

A third vacant property is being renovated as we speak. The other former Supersol near the recinto ferial (showground) on the by-pass, which has been closed for years, is being re-furbished by Sevilla supermarket chain Carmela and looks like it will open soon.

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Back to Supeco, I went to check it out. It’s very yellow, but so is egg yolk, so let’s not hold that against them.

When I got there the car park was full, and so was the store.

And what a transformation from the shabby, smelly and run-down Supersol shoppers have had to put up with for years! I wonder whether the new owners have fixed the leaks in the roof?

Anyway, the place has been completely gutted and is now a well-organised, slick and clean shop. However, there are clearly a few teething problems. They had run out of cheddar cheese and there was some rotting fruit on display which should have been removed, but as far as I could tell prices are competitive.

Rondeños obviously like Supeco too! As I noted earlier, the car park was full and the store was very busy. Most shoppers had trolleys crammed full with purchases.

It was also good to see that the new owners have kept on most of the former Supersol staff.

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When I went to Brico Bazar Ronda, I was expecting more of the same old, same old, a range of products similar to all the other Chinese shops.

Not the case, the offer is different. There are things on sale that you might even consider buying! I found a couple of items I’d been looking for in vain in other Ronda stores for weeks.

When I came to pay, I was surprised that the nice young man at the checkout presented me with a 2019 bottle of tempranillo and a voucher to use the next time I shop there.

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So what with all the other new things underway in Ronda, eg the new bus station, the new municipal swimming pool, the imminent construction of a new Mercadona, a massive car park in the barrio de San Francisco, the four exciting murals dotted around the centre, rampant housebuilding and the announcement this week that the Madrid central government is providing 227 million euros to upgrade the railway line from Algeciras to Bobadilla, this town looks like it’s going places!

And if the campaign for a new autovía is successful, Ronda will be more even more busy than it currently is!

The Algeciras – Bobadilla railway line, which runs through the Serranía, is to get a 200-millio-euro upgrade