Day trips from Granada

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.

Guadix is the cave city of Andalucía: an estimated 2,000 families still live in cave houses hollowed from the soft tufa hills below the town's Moorish alcazaba, in a troglodyte neighbourhood that has been continuously inhabited since the Bronze Age and remains fully residential today.

A Moorish-rooted hilltop village in Málaga province, where an Arab castle once dominated the surrounding valleys and the legacy of three cultures — Muslim, Jewish, and Christian — is still written into the walls.

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.

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.

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.

Baza was the capital of an ancient Iberian kingdom whose most famous citizen — the Lady of Baza, a magnificent 4th-century BCE stone figure — now presides over the National Archaeological Museum in Madrid, though replicas and the excavated site itself tell a compelling story of the pre-Roman south in the town that produced her.

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.

A crossroads city in Málaga province, Antequera holds Spain's finest collection of megalithic tombs, a Moorish alcazaba, and more than fifty historic religious and civic buildings spread across a skyline shaped by 4,000 years of continuous occupation.

A UNESCO World Heritage city in Jaén, Andalucía, where Bronze Age foundations lie beneath Roman, Visigoth, Moorish, and Renaissance stone, all within a single historic centre.

A UNESCO World Heritage city in Jaén, Úbeda holds what archaeologists say is the oldest scientifically documented urban site in western Europe, surrounded by Renaissance palaces, medieval churches, and the layered stones of six thousand years of continuous human presence.

Perched in the mountains of Jaén, Cazorla holds two castles on a single hilltop, a ruined Renaissance church that became an open-air stage, and a history stretching from Iberian settlements to a medieval frontier lordship.

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.

Linares was one of the great mining cities of the ancient world — the Castulo site outside town rivals any Iberian-Roman city in Spain — and is famous in taurine history as the ring where Manolete, the greatest bullfighter of the 20th century, received his fatal horn wound in 1947.

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.

Baños de la Encina contains the most complete and best-preserved Moorish castle in Spain: a 10th-century Caliphal fortress with 14 towers and an arched gateway that appears almost untouched by eight centuries of weather, looming over a small agricultural village that seems barely to notice its extraordinary good fortune.

Estepa perches on a dramatic limestone ridge above the Sevillian plains, famous across Spain as the birthplace of the mantecado and polvorón — the crumbly Christmas sweets sold in every Spanish home — yet its hilltop old town, ringed with baroque churches and a Moorish tower, rewards those who climb up to look beyond the biscuit tins.

Iznatoraf is a near-vertical Moorish village on a limestone ridge above the olive sea of the Jaén Altiplano, so compact and so precipitously sited that its streets double as stairways and the main square hangs over a sheer cliff — one of the most dramatic village settings in Andalucía and one of the least visited.

A Sevillian Renaissance town whose 16th-century count raised thirteen churches, a university, and a ducal pantheon in a single generation, leaving Osuna with one of the most ambitious concentrations of monumental architecture in southern Spain.

Écija, the 'city of towers', crowds its ancient Roman street plan with eleven baroque church towers and a trove of Roman mosaics that surface whenever the city digs — making it the unofficial open-air mosaic museum of Andalucía.

A Cádiz hill town carved literally into the rock face, where houses line the underside of a cliff above the river and a near-impregnable Nasrid castle stands watch over streets that changed hands seven times before finally falling to Castile in 1484.

Vélez-Blanco's Renaissance castle crowns a white limestone crag above one of the remotest valleys of northern Almería — a magnificent building whose marble patio was sold to an American collector in 1904 and now stands, reassembled, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, while the gutted shell above the village is arguably more impressive than the original ever was.

Ronda stands on a dramatic gorge in Málaga, its Moorish old quarter, Arab baths, ancient bullring, and an 18th-century bridge spanning a 100-metre drop to the river below making it one of Andalucía's most historically layered towns.