Zuheros

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.

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.

Alcalá la Real is dominated by La Mota, a mountaintop fortress-city above the olive groves of the Jaén-Granada border — a self-contained walled town on a volcanic tuff ridge, with ruined churches and palaces standing open to the sky, that was abandoned in the 19th century and has been slowly reclaiming itself from the vegetation ever since.

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 Granada hill town whose surrounding landscape holds megalithic tombs, cave dwellings, and prehistoric settlements stretching back to 4500 BC, making it one of Andalucía's most layered archaeological territories.

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.