Walk to the Cabo de Gata lighthouse on the volcanic headland of the natural park

Snorkel in the marine reserve, 12,000 of the park's 49,512 hectares

Visit Rodalquilar, the abandoned gold-mining village where operations ceased in the mid-1960s

Look for flamingos on the Las Salinas salt flats

Cabo de Gata is the driest place in Europe — under 200mm of rain a year — and it is volcanic, so the coast is black and red rock broken by coves of pale sand with nothing built on them. It became a natural park in 1987, which is why the stretch between Almería and Mojácar is the only substantial piece of the Spanish Mediterranean coast never developed. Rodalquilar was a gold-mining village until the mid-1960s and is now largely abandoned buildings among the cactus, which is exactly as strange as it sounds.

Cabo de Gata: Volcanic Coves in the Driest Corner of Europe

Walk the Barrio de los Alfareros and watch traditional Almerían pottery being thrown

Find out what a jarapa is and how it is woven from cut-up cloth

Find out what happened at the Cortijo del Fraile on 22 July 1928 and what Lorca made of it

Find the Portillo passage, a gate of the old walled enclosure

Read Goytisolo's Campos de Níjar before you come and see how much of the 1954 landscape survives

Níjar is the most craft-based municipality in Almería province, with about a dozen working workshops — the Barrio de los Alfareros still throws traditional Almerían pottery, and the town is known across Spain for jarapas, rag rugs woven from cut-up cloth. On 22 July 1928, at the Cortijo del Fraile outside the town, a bride ran off with her cousin on the morning of her wedding and he was shot dead. Lorca read it in the paper and wrote Blood Wedding. Carmen de Burgos wrote Puñal de Claveles from the same events, and Juan Goytisolo wrote Campos de Níjar about this country in 1954.

Níjar: Jarapas, Pots and Blood Wedding

Walk the three enclosures in order and work out that each one is from a different period

Find the Christian castle at the far end, added by the Catholic Monarchs on top of a Muslim fortress

Work out why it was built at all: a 10th-century watchpost for Pechina, which was then the town that mattered

Work out the chronology across the three enclosures — two Arab, one Christian of the 15th and 16th centuries

Look across at the Cerro de San Cristóbal opposite, with its own stretch of wall running up the hill

Almería's Alcazaba is the second-largest Arab fortress built in the Iberian peninsula and one of the best-preserved citadels anywhere — three walled enclosures running along a ridge above the city and the sea. Abd al-Rahman III founded the place in the 10th century as a watchpost for Bayyana, modern Pechina, which is where the Arabic name Al-Mariyya Bayyana comes from. The first enclosure held cisterns and a garrison encampment, the second the palace, and the third is a late-medieval Christian castle with towers of the 15th and 16th centuries, added after the city fell. Nearly a thousand years of building means the place shows the whole evolution of civil and military architecture under al-Andalus in one walk.

The Alcazaba of Almería

Walk the lines of wall and work out how many separate circuits the town had

Find the outlying forts on the ridges and work out what they were watching for

Go into the necropolis — thirteen hectares of tombs, twice the size of the town itself

Work out the dating: about 3200 to 2200 BC, and the 2020 case that this is Iberia's first city

Look at the ground it chose — a spur between a river and a rambla, which is a water decision and a defence decision at once

Los Millares is a Copper Age settlement on a spur between the Andarax and a rambla in Almería, occupied from about 3200 to 2200 BC — six hectares of town and thirteen of cemetery, defended by successive lines of wall and a set of outlying forts. Research published in 2020 made the case that this was the first true city established anywhere in the Iberian peninsula, more than five thousand years ago. It is considered one of the most important settlements of its culture in Europe.

Los Millares: The First City in Iberia

Go into the system with a guide and work out how a gypsum cave differs from a limestone one

Find the geodes — crystals grown where dissolved gypsum stood in a cavity and recrystallised

Work out the timescale: this karst formed fast and will collapse and disappear equally fast

Walk the canyon of the Aguas above ground and find the dolines where cave roofs have fallen in

Do one of the harder caving routes if you want the version with a harness and crawling

Most caves in Europe are in limestone. Sorbas is in gypsum — a deposit the Aguas has cut into caves, canyons, dolines and geodes, protected as a Paraje Natural since 1989. Gypsum dissolves far more readily than limestone, so the karst forms fast in geological terms, and disappears fast too: the caves collapse quickly and the deposit will eventually vanish altogether. The formations are different because of it, with crystal geodes where mineral-laden water has stood in a cavity and recrystallised.

The Gypsum Karst of Sorbas

Visit Mini Hollywood Oasys, one of the three western theme parks built on the sets of the Tabernas Desert, alongside Fort Bravo Texas Hollywood and Western Leone

Take a guided 4x4 tour into the Tabernas Desert, Europe's only desert, north of Almería with 15–22cm of rain a year

Look for Bonelli's eagles and ocellated lizards on a walk in the Tabernas badlands

Tabernas gets between 15 and 22 centimetres of rain a year, which makes it the only true desert in continental Europe. The rain that does fall is torrential, and because the marl and sandstone cannot hold it the water simply erodes the ground into badlands — which in the 1960s Italian directors worked out looked exactly like Mexico and Arizona and cost a fraction as much to film in. Hundreds of westerns were shot here. Three of the sets are still standing and running as western parks, and the badlands around them are a serious raptor site.

The Tabernas Desert: Western Film Sets in Europe's Only Desert

Go to the archaeological museum and the necropolis and work out what was found here on 21 July 1971

Work out what the cavity in her side contained and what that makes the sculpture

Find out where the original is now and how long Baza has been asking for her back

Come in September for the Cascamorras and find out what happens to the man who runs it

Find the Arab baths in the old Jewish quarter, which are among the best preserved in Spain

On 21 July 1971 the archaeologist Francisco José Presedo Velo found a 4th-century BC Iberian sculpture in the Cerro del Santuario necropolis of ancient Basti — a seated woman in polychromed limestone, carved by the Bastetani, with a cavity in the side that held cremated remains. The Lady of Baza is one of the defining objects of Iberian art, alongside the Lady of Elche. The original is in Madrid and the argument about returning her to Baza has been running for decades. The town also holds the Cascamorras, in which a man tries to seize an image and is covered in oil for trying.

Baza: The Lady in the Museum

Tour the González Byass bodega in Jerez de la Frontera, founded in 1835 and maker of Tío Pepe

Watch a flamenco show at the Andalusian Centre of Flamenco in Jerez, established in 1993

See the Royal Andalusian School of Equestrian Art in Jerez, home of the Carthusian horse

Sherry is made in a triangle of three towns between Jerez, Sanlúcar and El Puerto de Santa María, and it is unlike any other wine because of the solera: barrels stacked in tiers, wine drawn only from the bottom row and topped up from the row above, so nothing is ever a single vintage and every glass contains a trace of everything that came before. Some soleras have been running since the 19th century. Fino and manzanilla age under flor, a living yeast cap that keeps the air off the wine.

Jerez: Sherry, Flamenco and the Royal School of Equestrian Art

Walk through the Nasrid Palaces at your booked time, as far as the Court of the Lions

Climb the Torre de la Vela on the Alcazaba, built between 1238 and 1279, for the view over Granada and the Vega

Walk the gardens of the Generalife, the Nasrid kings' villa above the palaces

Go into the Palace of Charles V, begun in the 1520s inside the Nasrid walls

The Alhambra is the palace-city on its hill above Granada, built for the Nasrid emirs and their court and later lived in by the Kings of Castile; the decoration of the Nasrid Palaces is one of the high points of Andalusi art. It became Spain's first UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1984, together with the Generalife, the Nasrid kings' country villa and gardens just above it, and in 2016 it had over 2.6 million visitors, second in Spain only to the Sagrada Família. When Granada surrendered in 1492, the Catholic Monarchs' men raised the cross and their banner on the Tower of Comares, and in the 1520s Charles V began a Renaissance palace inside the walls. On the Alcazaba, the Torre de la Vela, built between 1238 and 1279, had a bell rung at dawn to tell the farmers of the Vega when to water.