Walk the Barribarto, the Morisco quarter, and find the ceramic panels telling the 1569 rebellion

Work out what happened on the Peñón above the village at the end of that rebellion

Find the sugar cane factory in the village, one of the last that worked in Europe

Taste the Axarquía muscatel, made from grapes dried on the slope before pressing

Walk up into the Sierras de Tejeda, Almijara y Alhama behind the village

Frigiliana sits above the coast at the western end of the Axarquía, a whitewashed Morisco quarter of stepped lanes built at angles that make sense only on foot, with ceramic panels set into the walls telling the story of the 1569 Morisco rebellion that ended on the crag above the village. Behind it rise the Sierras de Tejeda, Almijara y Alhama. The Axarquía is the hot inland corner of Málaga province that grows muscatel grapes on impossible slopes and dries them on the ground into raisins, and makes a sweet wine from the rest.

Frigiliana and the Axarquía

Go through the tourist galleries — over nine thousand square metres of them — and find the largest columns

Find out what happened on 12 January 1959 and who found the cave

Work out the argument about the seal paintings: 42,000 years and Neanderthal, or 18,000 to 20,000 and Homo sapiens

Work out why the dating matters so much to the question of whether Neanderthals made art

Find out what is behind the tourist route — the high galleries and new galleries, which are not open

Five boys out catching bats found the cave at Maro on 12 January 1959. What they had walked into is over nine thousand square metres of show galleries alone, with chambers big enough to hold concerts and speleothems on a scale unusual anywhere. It also holds rock paintings, and this is where the argument is: organic material associated with a group of seal paintings was dated in 2012 to 42,000 years, which would have made them the oldest art in human history and Neanderthal work — and then a 2017 study brought the age down to between 20,000 and 18,000 years, putting them in the Magdalenian and making them Homo sapiens.

The Cave of Nerja

Walk the Parque Botánico El Majuelo in Almuñécar and see the excavated Roman fish-salting factory, on the site of the Phoenician settlement of Sexi founded around 800 BC

Climb to the Castillo de San Miguel above the town

Taste the subtropical fruit grown on the coast — cherimoyas, mangos, avocados and loquats — at an Almuñécar market or farm shop

See the Cueva de los Siete Palacios, the Roman structure later used as a cave dwelling

The coast between Almuñécar and Motril is backed by mountains that keep the north wind off it, which gives it a microclimate warm enough to grow cherimoya, mango, avocado and loquat commercially — subtropical fruit, in Europe. Almuñécar is much older than the farming: the Phoenicians founded Sexi here around 800 BC and the Romans ran an industrial fish-salting operation whose tanks have been excavated in the middle of the town, under a botanical garden.

Almuñécar: Roman Fish Tanks and Subtropical Fruit

Take the waters at the baths, which have run since the Romans

Find the 12th-century Arab bath house still standing over the spring

Work out what the fall of Alhama in 1482 did to Granada strategically

Find the ballad with the refrain Ay de mi Alhama and work out why it was written

Walk the gorge below the town along the Alhama river

Alhama means the baths, and the hot springs here have been used since the Romans, with a 12th-century Arab bath house still standing over the water. When Castile took the town in 1482 it cut the road between Granada and Málaga and effectively began the end of the Nasrid kingdom — the ballad that came out of it, with the refrain Ay de mi Alhama, is one of the best-known in Spanish. The town stands on the edge of a gorge cut by the Alhama river, with a walkway along it.

Alhama de Granada: Ay de mi Alhama

Climb to the Nasrid castle on the rock and look down at the cane plain and the sea

Work out that this was the last place in continental Europe growing sugar cane commercially

Find out what the Nasrid kings used this castle for besides defence

Walk the white lanes of the old town on the way up, which are stepped throughout

Go down to the Peñón on the beach, which is the rock the town is named after

Salobreña is a white town piled onto a rock above the Granada coast with a Nasrid castle on top, and what is unusual is the ground below it: a flat green plain of sugar cane running to the sea. Sugar was introduced here under Islamic rule and this was the last place in continental Europe still growing it commercially into the 21st century. The Nasrid kings used the castle as a residence and, on occasion, as a prison for members of their own family.

Salobreña: A Castle Over Sugar Cane

Take the waters at the balneario, which is why the town exists as it does

Walk between the public fountains in the town and taste the difference between the springs

Work out what the name means, and that it was describing the springs long before anyone bottled them

Come for the carrera del agua on the night of San Juan, when the town throws buckets of water over everybody in the street — while the rest of Spain spends that night round a fire

Use it as the gateway it is and go on up into the Alpujarra afterwards

Lanjarón is probably an Arabic rendering of a pre-Roman word meaning a place full of springs, and the name has turned out to be the whole story: the town sits on the western edge of the Alpujarra below the Sierra Nevada, its spa has drawn people for two centuries, and the one industry in the place bottles the water and sells it across Spain. It is the gateway to the Alpujarra proper, so it is also the sensible place to start anything going further up the valley.

Lanjarón: The Water Town of the Alpujarra

Walk up from the Roman theatre through the double enclosure and count the gates you pass through

Find the Roman marble and columns reused in the Muslim building, taken from the theatre downhill

Work out Torres Balbás's comparison and why he reached for a Crusader castle in Syria for a parallel

Walk the Coracha up to Gibralfaro, the corridor that linked fortress and castle

Stand at one point and see Roman theatre, Islamic fortress and Renaissance palace at the same time

Leopoldo Torres Balbás, who restored it, called the Alcazaba of Málaga the prototype of 11th-century taifa military architecture — a double walled enclosure with an extraordinary density of fortification, whose only real parallel he thought was the Crac des Chevaliers in Syria. It stands on the slope of Gibralfaro, joined to the castle above by a walled corridor called the Coracha, on top of an earlier Phoenician-Punic fortification. Some historians say Badis ben Habus built it, robbing marble, columns and statues from the Roman theatre immediately below — a theatre you can now see from the same spot.

The Alcazaba of Málaga: A Taifa Fortress on a Roman Theatre

Go in with the family who own it, which is how this cave has always been shown

Find the fish and the seal, and work out how odd they are this far from the sea and from Cantabria

Work out why Franco-Cantabrian style art here changed what was understood about the range of Palaeolithic art

Find out how it was discovered: a farmer after bat guano in 1905, following bats into a hole

Find out who Verner, Breuil and Obermaier were and what each of them did with the find

José Bullón Lobato was looking for bat guano to fertilise his rented fields in 1905 when he noticed bats coming out of a hole and went in. What he found was Palaeolithic parietal art in the Franco-Cantabrian style a very long way from where that style is supposed to be — deer, horses, fish, goats, bulls, a seal, a bison, abstract signs. Willoughby Verner, a retired British colonel living near Algeciras, heard about it in 1907, and Henri Breuil and Hugo Obermaier later studied it. The cave is still owned and shown by the Bullón family.