Heritage towns in Córdoba
11 towns in this province.
An Andalusian hilltop city in Córdoba province, its Moorish old quarter, Arab castle, and more than thirty listed heritage sites making it one of the most historically layered towns in the region.
Perched on a rocky outcrop in Córdoba province, Zuheros pairs a Moorish castle and a cave with fossil remains with the unhurried whitewashed streets of a classic Andalusian hill village.
Lucena was the 'Jerusalem of the Jews' in Moorish Andalucía, the most important Jewish intellectual centre in the western Mediterranean for two centuries, home of Maimonides' teachers, and still adorned with a tower whose lower section is the only surviving Jewish tower in Spain.
Baena produces some of the finest olive oil in Spain under a Denominación de Origen that covers the rolling Campiña hills, and during Semana Santa its streets erupt in one of the most primordial drum-beating processions in the country — a pagan-sounding continuous drumming that starts on Holy Wednesday and does not stop until Good Friday.
Montilla is the name on the bottle that wine merchants called 'sherry' before Jerez got the trademark — the unfortified Pedro Ximénez wines aged in clay tinajas here are the original Amontillado, and the town that produced El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, the first great mestizo writer of the Americas, is both an oenological and a literary pilgrimage.
Aguilar de la Frontera's Plaza de San José is one of the most unusual town squares in Andalucía: octagonal rather than rectangular, lined with colonnaded houses, and built in the late 18th century in a form that suggests the mason may have had a compass when he should have had a ruler.
Belalcázar contains the tallest castle keep in Spain — the Torre del Homenaje of the Zúñiga Castle rises 50 metres above the Los Pedroches plateau in near-perfect condition, an isolated tower of enormous ambition in a small village on the edge of Extremadura, built to proclaim the power of a family that also funded Columbus's third voyage.
A Caliphate-era fortress whose seven towers gave a whole town its name, standing over the fertile Córdoba countryside on an ancient road between Córdoba and Jaén.
A town born from two medieval settlements on the old frontier of Córdoba, its Mudéjar church, Baroque altarpiece, manor houses, and string of hilltop hermitages telling the story of centuries of divided loyalties and quiet ambition.
A white Andalucían town above a great meander of the Guadalquivir, its old quarter dense with Gothic-Mudéjar churches, noble stone doorways, and layers of history stretching back five thousand years to the edge of the Córdoba plain.
A walled Andalusian town on the Guadalquivir in Córdoba province, where a Moorish alcazaba, medieval ramparts, and a clutch of convents and palaces trace ten centuries of layered history.