Montilla

Human presence around Montilla goes back to the Lower Palaeolithic. Flint tools, scrapers, burins, and Bell Beaker burials have all been found in the area, and the municipality is one of the few places in the province of Córdoba where Epipaleolithic sites have been recorded, among them Fuente de Pez, notable for its microlith finds. Neolithic and Chalcolithic remains are plentiful too, including ceramics, flint tools, and arrowheads.

On the hill where the castle later stood, excavations have revealed a pre-Roman settlement on its slopes. Roman-era finds, a statue of Diana the huntress, stretches of Roman road, suggest a Hispano-Roman presence, though no confirmed Roman town has been identified. Nearby, in the area of Llanos de Vanda, historians have tentatively placed the Battle of Munda (45 BC), where Julius Caesar defeated the sons of Pompey the Great, though scholars remain uncertain about the exact site.

Tartessian and Iberian remains have also been found within the castle precinct. The town's name derives from the Arabic Montiya, a term denoting a human settlement or neighbourhood, and the surrounding area was sparsely populated during the early Islamic period, bordering the districts of Cabra and Córdoba. Montilla was absorbed into the Castilian-Leonese crown between 1240 and 1241, during Fernando III's campaigns, and was subsequently repopulated with families from León.

It passed through several noble hands before 1371, when Enrique II of Castile granted it to Lope Gutiérrez de Córdoba, giving the town independent jurisdiction and the status of villa. From that point it became the effective centre of the Lordship of Aguilar, a role it retained even after the lords of Aguilar were raised to the rank of Marquesses of Priego by the Catholic Monarchs.

Montilla's castle was one of the great medieval fortresses of the region, but it no longer stands. In 1508, Fernando the Catholic ordered it demolished as punishment for the rebellion of Pedro Fernández de Córdoba y Pacheco, the first Marquess of Priego. The destruction was controversial enough that the King of France appealed for clemency, the castle had been the birthplace of Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, known as the Gran Capitán, the most celebrated Spanish military commander of the age.

Queen Juana I later granted a pardon and authorised rebuilding, but it never happened. Instead, ducal grain stores, the alhorí, were built on the site in the eighteenth century, under Nicolás Fernández de Córdoba, Duke of Medinaceli. The architect Juan Antonio Camacho designed the structure across three floors, with five vaulted naves on the ground level and three on the floor above.

The town council bought the building in 1998 and began converting it into the Museo del Vino de Andalucía in 2007, with galleries covering both winemaking and the life of the Gran Capitán. The town hall occupies a former convent-hospital of San Juan de Dios, begun in 1601. Its stone facade is neoclassical in inspiration, with a small central tower carrying an old clock.

Inside, a glass-roofed cloister is ringed by columns with semicircular arches. The church of San Juan de Dios, attributed to Fray Francisco Álvarez and built on an octagonal plan, now serves as the town's municipal exhibition hall. The Casa de las Aguas, built in 1845 in the historic centre, is a manor house organised around two sections linked by a garden.

Its defining feature is a porticoed courtyard with semicircular arches on Tuscan columns. The building takes its name from the water cisterns it once housed, which supplied the town, Montilla had no piped drinking water until 1872. Since 2006 it has been home to the only museum dedicated to the painter José Santiago Garnelo y Alda, and its upper floor permanently houses the Fundación Biblioteca Manuel Ruiz Luque, a collection of thirty thousand volumes assembled by a local bibliophile over fifty years.