Galaroza

A mountain village in Huelva's sierra where a twelve-spout fountain gives birth to a river, pouring two million litres a day through centuries-old irrigation channels into the surrounding orchards.

A small Andalusian town in Huelva where a great Renaissance humanist once retreated to a rocky outcrop above the plain, leaving behind a hermitage, caves, and views that reach across the province.

On the highest ridge of the Huelva sierra, Almonaster la Real contains one of the oldest functioning mosques in Spain: a 10th-century building on Roman foundations where Friday prayers have continued, on and off, for over a thousand years, and whose minaret now doubles as the belfry of a small Christian hermitage.

Aracena sits above one of Spain's great underground surprises — the Gruta de las Maravillas, a cave of extraordinary stalactites and turquoise pools — and above that stands a ruined Templar castle, while the surrounding sierra is ground zero for the world's finest jamón ibérico de bellota.

A frontier town on the edge of Andalucía and Portugal, Aroche has been occupied since the Stone Age and still stands behind its artillery walls, with a Almohad castle at its centre and a Roman city buried in its fields.

Fregenal de la Sierra is home to one of Spain's great curiosities: a bullring built entirely within the courtyard of a medieval Templar castle, the two structures coexisting in a way that somehow makes both more interesting — and neither functions as a museum.

One of Andalucía's oldest continuously settled towns, Zufre rises above the Sierra de Huelva behind medieval walls that once enclosed a city of 6,000, with two surviving fortified towers still standing guard over its historic core.

A Templar stronghold in Badajoz whose medieval walls, baroque tower-tops, and layers of Roman, Visigothic, and Moorish history make it one of Extremadura's most richly stratified towns.