Carratraca

Carratraca's origins are obscure, but Roman-era bathing troughs, burial sites, pottery fragments, and traces of a wall suggest the area was inhabited and later abandoned, left to grow over with dense oak woodland. The town as it exists today grew up around its sulphurous springs. Local tradition credits the discovery of their healing properties to a beggar named Juan Camisón — named for the long nightshirt he wore to avoid irritating the sores that covered his body.

Arriving at a farmstead by the spring, he watched a goatherd use the water on animals with skin ulcers and saw them heal. He bathed himself and recovered too. By 1817 a doctor was formally studying the waters and treating patients.

Carratraca became an independent municipality in 1821, splitting from neighbouring Casarabonela. The spa complex followed in 1847, approved by the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando. In 1970 the town briefly attracted national attention when surveys were launched to locate diamonds in the area; the deposits proved uneconomical to extract.

The parish church of Nuestra Señora de la Salud dates from the early twentieth century, built on the site of an older hermitage. Inside, three naves are divided by semicircular arches, with wooden roof structures and hemispherical vaults over the presbytery and the side chapel housing the Virgin of Health. The town hall is worth a look for its neo-Moorish style, with two stacked galleries of horseshoe arches. More unusual still is the small bullring, polygonal in plan and carved directly into the rock of the Sierra Blanquilla; local residents use it as a stage for Passion plays during Holy Week.

The spa is the town's centrepiece. The stone building has a neoclassical façade whose design was approved by the Royal Academy of San Fernando, and inside, an interior courtyard with ceramic dado tiles surrounds a small colonnaded pavilion of white jasper marble columns. The whole complex was built in 1847 at the height of the European spa era.

Outside the town, the Cueva del Duende and the Abrigo de Alcaparaín rock shelter are both worth a visit, as are the Sima Gorda and the Sima de los Murciélagos, the latter a cave site used as a necropolis.