Andalusia
When to go
March to May and late September to November. In July and August the inland towns — Seville, Cordoba, Ronda — routinely pass forty degrees in the afternoon, and a car trip becomes a sequence of dashes between air conditioning. Winter is mild on the coast and genuinely cold in the mountains at night, and some of the hill villages shut their restaurants in January. Spring is also when the gorge at Ronda has water in it.
The stops
Interactive map of the route on our site ›
- Seville2 nights
The Alcazar is not a museum: the upper floors are still an official residence of the Spanish royal family, which makes it the oldest royal palace in Europe still in use. The rest of it was built by Christian kings who hired Muslim craftsmen, so a Catholic palace carries Arabic inscriptions praising God in the plasterwork.
- Jerez de la Fronterastop on the way
Sherry is not the wine of a year. It is aged in a solera: barrels stacked in rows, a third drawn from the bottom row and replaced from the row above, every year, for decades. So every glass contains a little of every vintage since the row was started, and no bottle can honestly carry a date.
- Cadizone night
Founded by Phoenicians around 1100 BC, which makes it the oldest continuously inhabited city in western Europe. And it has a second claim: in 1812, while the French army besieged it and the rest of Spain was occupied, the Spanish parliament sat here and wrote the first Spanish constitution — in a city surrounded on three sides by water and on the fourth by an enemy.
- Vejer de la Fronterastop on the way
Until the 1930s the women of this town wore the cobijada, a black cloak that covered the whole body and the face and left one eye showing. It was not a religious garment and it was worn nowhere else in Spain; it was banned in the Civil War years because you could hide anything under it.
- Baelo Claudiastop on the way
A Roman town on the beach of Bolonia, under a great dune, that lived on tuna. Beside the forum and the temples stand the stone vats where the fish was salted and made into garum, the fermented fish sauce that Rome poured on almost everything.
- Tarifaone night
The southernmost point of continental Europe, and Africa is fourteen kilometres away across the strait — on a clear day you see the houses in Morocco, not just the coast. The wind here almost never stops, which ruined the town as a port and made it the kitesurfing capital of Europe.
- Gaucinstop on the way
A white village on a ridge with a view down to Gibraltar and, on a clear day, to Africa. Its castle, the Castillo del Águila, is where Guzmán el Bueno, the defender of Tarifa, was killed in 1309 while besieging it.
- Ronda2 nights
The town sits on both sides of a gorge a hundred metres deep, and the bridge that joins them took thirty-four years to build. The bullring, finished in 1785, is one of the oldest in Spain and has the widest arena of any — and the chamber inside the bridge was used as a prison, and in the Civil War as something worse.
- Setenil de las Bodegasstop on the way
The houses here are not built under a cliff for the shade. The river cut a shelf of rock, people walled in the space beneath it, and the overhang became the roof — so an entire street is roofed by a single slab of stone that nobody put there.
- Olverastop on the way
A castle and a church share one rock above the town and can be seen from thirty kilometres away. Below it runs the Via Verde de la Sierra, a cycling trail on a railway line that was built in the 1920s and never carried a single train — the money ran out before the rails were laid, and the tunnels and viaducts stood empty for seventy years.
- El Torcal de Antequerastop on the way
The grey slabs stacked here like plates were a seabed a hundred and fifty million years ago. The rock rose, rain dissolved the limestone along its horizontal beds, and what is left standing are the harder layers — so you are walking through the inside of a dissolved mountain, not a pile of rocks.
- Antequeraone night
At the edge of the town stand the Dolmens of Antequera, burial chambers of giant stone slabs some five thousand years old, a World Heritage site since 2016. The largest, Menga, does not face the sunrise as such tombs usually do: it points at the Peña de los Enamorados, a mountain shaped like a sleeping face.
- Lucenastop on the way
In the eleventh and twelfth centuries Lucena was a Jewish city, called the Pearl of Sepharad, with a famous yeshiva headed by Rabbi Isaac Alfasi and then by his student Joseph ibn Migash. It ended with the Almohad conquest of 1148; in 2006 road builders uncovered its Jewish cemetery, with hundreds of graves.
- Cordoba2 nights
The Mezquita is a mosque with a cathedral standing inside it. Charles the Fifth allowed the cathedral to be cut into the middle of the hall, saw the result, and is reported to have told the builders they had destroyed something unique to build something ordinary. Around eight hundred and fifty of the original columns are still there, and in the tenth century this was probably the largest city in western Europe.
- Zuherosstop on the way
A white village of a few hundred people under a castle on a crag, and in the cliff below it is the Cueva de los Murcielagos, with Neolithic wall paintings and burials — people were living in this rock six thousand years before the castle was thought of.
- Priego de Cordobaone night
A small town with baroque churches that would not be out of place in a capital, and the reason is silk: in the eighteenth century Priego was a silk-weaving centre, the money arrived, and it was spent on gilding. When the industry collapsed the town stayed small and the churches stayed.
- Montefriostop on the way
The church stands on the rock where the castle was, because they knocked the castle down and built the church on its foundations. The other church in the village, round and domed, was modelled on the Pantheon in Rome — in a village of six thousand people.
- Granada2 nights
Granada was the last Muslim kingdom in Spain and it fell in 1492, the same year Columbus sailed — he was at the surrender. And the city has one habit found almost nowhere else in Spain: order a drink anywhere and a plate of food arrives with it, included, and you do not choose what it is.
- Salobrenastop on the way
A white town poured down a rock above the sea, crowned by a Moorish castle. The Nasrid sultans of Granada used it as a royal prison: Yusuf, later Yusuf III, was held here by his brother Muhammad VII until he came to the throne in 1408.
- Nerjastop on the way
The cave above the town was found in 1959 by five boys who went out after bats and dropped through a hole in the ground. Inside were chambers the size of a cathedral, burials, and paintings. The town above it had been living over that for as long as it had existed.
- Malagaone night
The Roman theatre at the foot of the Alcazaba was found in 1951 during building work on a cultural centre, and the centre was put up on top of it anyway. It took until 1994 for the building to be removed and the theatre to be uncovered properly — so for forty years the city had a Roman theatre under its arts centre.
What it costs
Eighty dollars a night is the room and nothing else. The car, the fuel and the parking are yours, and parking is the one that surprises people: the old centres of Seville, Cordoba and Granada are closed to traffic and enforced by camera, so you park outside and walk in. Budget for a public garage in every one of the four cities. Fuel across this route is roughly a tank and a half.
What to know
Three things nobody mentions before you book. One: the low-emission and restricted zones. Driving into a marked old town without a permit is an automatic fine that reaches the rental company months later, with a handling charge on top — check whether your hotel can register your plate, and most of them can. Two: the mountain roads between Ronda and Antequera are good tarmac but narrow and bent, and the posted hour is not the real hour. Three: the rental deposit. A hold of six hundred to twelve hundred euros on the card, plus the insurance excess, and it is released weeks after you return the car.
Roads, tolls and rules
Spain now has low-emission zones in more than fifty cities, and this is the one that catches visitors. Entry is read by camera and needs a DGT environmental label — and the DGT does not issue that label to a foreign-registered car, so a hire car on Spanish plates will have one and a car you drove in from abroad will not. Seville, Cordoba, Granada, Malaga and Cadiz all operate a zone. The fine runs to two hundred euros and reaches the rental company months later. The pace is gentle: no driving day here is longer than about a hundred and sixty kilometres, with a night in Tarifa, Antequera and Priego to break the long mountain stretches, so there is time to walk every village on the way. Fuel is everywhere on the motorways and thin in the Sierra between Ronda and Antequera, where stations close early and some do not take cards at night. Charging is good along the coast and sparse inland. Winter here is mild and the summer is the hazard: forty degrees inland by two in the afternoon is normal from June to September.
Travel Andalusia
The route on our site, with a room up to $80 every night.