Baena

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Above the olive groves of Jaén, Martos rises around a dramatic rock — La Peña — crowned by a medieval castle and ringed by the walls and towers built by the Order of Calatrava to hold this frontier city against the Kingdom of Granada.

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.