The walkway was never meant for tourists. It was built between 1901 and 1905 to give workers at the hydroelectric power plants at Chorro Falls and Gaitanejo Falls a way to cross between them, carry materials, and inspect the water channel linking the two stations. The path was one meter wide, constructed of concrete resting on steel rails supported by stanchions driven into the rock face at roughly 45-degree angles. It served its utilitarian purpose for decades until King Alfonso XIII crossed it in 1921 for the inauguration of the Conde del Guadalhorce dam. After that royal walk, what had been the Camino del Rey, the King's Pathway, became affectionately known as El Caminito, the Little Path, and it stuck.

Neglect transformed the walkway from an industrial access path into a death trap. The concrete deteriorated year by year, leaving sections where nothing but steel crossbeams bridged the void. The most dramatic accident involved three men from El Chorro who attempted to cross the gorge using a zip line to reach a train line on the far side. The cable could not support their combined weight, and it snapped. After the government sealed the entrances, the path's reputation as forbidden fruit only intensified its appeal. Thrill-seekers from across Europe found ways around the barriers. The gorge itself claimed additional victims, people who attempted to navigate the cliffs rather than the ruined path, proving that the danger was in the landscape, not merely the infrastructure.

The gorge through which the path runs, the Desfiladero de los Gaitanes, began forming during the Mesozoic Era roughly 250 million years ago, when the entire region lay beneath the sea. Millennia of accumulated marine sediment from coral and ancient species compressed into the limestone and dolomite that now form the gorge walls. Karst weathering dissolved the limestone into a network of caves, grottos, and jagged formations. The Guadalhorce River completed the work, carving the gorge itself and grinding massive potholes into the rock where water swirled around boulders over geological time. The result is a chasm whose walls rise sheer on both sides, barely wide enough for the river at its narrowest points, with the walkway clinging to the cliff face like a thread on a cathedral wall.

The regional government of Andalusia and the local government of Malaga agreed in June 2011 to share the nine-million-euro cost of restoration. Specialized alpinists laid the cornerstone in March 2014, and the renovated path reopened on 29 March 2015, offering a 2.9-kilometer walk along the side of the gorge. The new walkway is modern and secure, with glass-floored sections that let hikers look straight down to the river, but the original path remains visible below in many places, its collapsed concrete and rusted stanchions a reminder of what the walk used to cost. The gorge has also appeared on screen: a chase scene in the 1960 film Scent of Mystery played out on the old walkway, and final scenes of the 1965 film Von Ryan's Express were shot where the path meets the railway. Today the path draws hundreds of thousands of visitors annually, all of them walking safely where others once risked their lives.