Totana

A city of Murcia with over 5,500 years of continuous settlement, its hilltop castle, medieval walls, and layered history — Roman, Arab, and Castilian — make it one of the most archaeologically rich towns in the region.

A Renaissance castle built not to protect its people but to subdue them looms over Mula's old town, where a cluster of churches, monasteries, and noble palaces trace the full arc of Murcia's history from Iberian settlement to the Baroque.

A hilltop old town in Murcia whose layers run from 4,400-year-old cave paintings and a Roman municipal capital to Renaissance churches and a Franciscan monastery still housing the town's patron saint.

A hilltop castle in Murcia shelters one of Spain's most venerated relics — the Cross of Caravaca — drawing pilgrims for centuries to a town whose medieval quarter, baroque churches, and prehistoric burial grounds layer thousands of years into a single hillside.

Cartagena was one of the great port cities of the ancient world — capital of Carthaginian Spain, major base of the Roman navy, and later a Byzantine and Moorish stronghold — and its compact old town and outstanding archaeological museum make it the finest place in Spain to understand the layered civilisations of the ancient Mediterranean coast.

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.

A town in Almería with more than thirty thousand years of human presence, its baroque church facade, stately manor houses, and wide 18th-century streets marking it as one of Andalucía's more quietly ambitious provincial towns.