Walk the excavated streets inside the walls and work out that this was the whole town, not a garrison

Work out the dates: besieged 1340, starved into surrender 1341, front line until 1492, then gradually abandoned because it was no longer needed

Go into the abbey church and look down through the glass floor at the graves under it

Climb the keep for the view towards Granada, which is what this place was watching

Work out why the town moved downhill and what that tells you about what walls were for

Alfonso XI besieged Alcalá la Real in 1340 and it capitulated to hunger in 1341, becoming from then until 1492 one of Castile's principal frontier posts facing the Nasrid kingdom of Granada — and Castile paid for it generously, adding works such as the Torre Nueva. The whole medieval town lived inside the walls; once Granada fell, the fortress was let go and the population drifted down to the suburbs on the plain, so what you walk through now is the excavated street plan of a town that emptied itself. The church inside has a glass floor over the burials beneath it.

Alcalá la Real: A Frontier Fortress for Two Centuries

Get to the Mirador de las Peñas and work out what National Geographic was looking at in 2015

Go into the Iglesia de la Encarnación, a round neoclassical church built on the model of the Pantheon

Climb to the Nasrid castle on the rock and find the church the Catholic Monarchs put inside it

Work out what the name means and whether the village lives up to it in January

Eat the local cheese and the morcilla, which is what the inland Granada kitchen runs on

In October 2015 National Geographic put Montefrío on a list of the ten best village views in the world, and the reason is a single composition: a round neoclassical church in the middle of the town, modelled on the Pantheon, with a Nasrid castle on a bare rock directly above it, and white houses filling everything between. The Catholic Monarchs built a church inside the castle after taking it, as they generally did. The name means exactly what it looks like — cold mountain.

Montefrío: Ten Best Views in the World

Go to the Fuente del Rey and count the spouts — there are well over a hundred

Go into the Sagrario chapel of the Asunción and work out why Cordoban Baroque is spoken of separately

Walk the Barrio de la Villa, the whitewashed medieval quarter on the edge of the cliff

Find out where the money came from: silk, taffeta and velvet sold as far as the Indies in the 18th century

Work out why it is called the city of water once you have found how many springs rise around it

Priego is called the city of water for the springs that rise all round it, and the jewel of Cordoban Baroque for what it built with the money. In the 18th century, after the Moriscos were expelled from the Puerta Granada quarter, it became one of the most important silk centres in Spain, selling taffeta and velvet to Seville, Málaga, Navarre, Portugal, France and the Indies — and that money paid for the churches. The Fuente del Rey has well over a hundred spouts. It sits in the middle of the Sierras Subbéticas, on the Route of the Caliphate.

Priego de Córdoba: Baroque and Water

Climb to the Cueva de los Murciélagos and find the three zones — the lived-in vestibule, the painted sanctuary and the burials at the back

Work out what the 1962 and 1969 digs established: that the Andalusian Neolithic began a thousand years earlier than anyone thought

Go into the Muslim castle built directly onto the crag above the houses

Ride or walk the Vía Verde de la Subbética through the tunnels and over the viaducts below the village

Eat the local sheep's cheese, which is what Zuheros sells beyond its own valley

Zuheros is a white village on a crag in the Sierras Subbéticas with a Muslim castle built into the rock above it, and above that is the Cueva de los Murciélagos. Excavations in 1962 and 1969 pushed the start of the Andalusian Neolithic back by a thousand years. The cave divides into three: a lit vestibule where people actually lived, a sanctuary with Neolithic and Chalcolithic paintings, and a burial zone at the back. Homo sapiens also left engravings and paintings of horses and deer here from around 18,000 years ago. The Vía Verde de la Subbética, on an abandoned railway, runs along the valley below through tunnels and over viaducts. The village also makes a sheep's cheese that it is known for across the province.

Zuheros and the Cave of the Bats

Taste extra virgin oils made from Picual olives at an almazara, an olive mill, in the province

Visit Jaén Cathedral, the Renaissance masterpiece by Andrés de Vandelvira begun in 1570, which holds the Veil of Veronica

Visit the Arab Baths under the Villardompardo Palace, among the largest Islamic bathhouses preserved in Spain

Drive up to the Castillo de Santa Catalina at 820m, above the city and the olive groves

Jaén is the largest producer of olive oil in the world — one province, outproducing whole countries — and the trees cover the hills in every direction to the horizon, a monoculture that has shaped everything about how people here live and vote. The dominant variety is Picual, high in polyphenols, stable and distinctly bitter and peppery. Tasting it properly at a mill, out of a blue glass so you cannot judge by colour, is a different thing from buying it in a supermarket.

Jaén: Vandelvira's Cathedral and the Olive Oil Capital

Go through the eleven original cave dwellings kept at the Centro de Interpretación

See a zambra danced and work out how it differs from the flamenco performed everywhere else

Find out where the zambra came from — Morisco wedding ritual, not Andalusian cante

Walk up the Camino del Sacromonte for the view straight across the Darro at the Alhambra

Read Lorca's Romancero Gitano and work out which parts of it are this hillside

Sacromonte is on the eastern edge of Granada in the Valparaíso valley, directly across the Darro from the Alhambra — the traditional quarter of Granada's Roma, who lived in caves dug into the hillside. Lorca wrote them into the Romancero Gitano. The zambra danced here is its own form, distinct from the rest of flamenco, and descends from Morisco wedding ceremonies rather than from the Andalusian cante. The Centro de Interpretación del Sacromonte keeps eleven of the caves in their original state and opens them to the public.

Sacromonte: The Cave Quarter Facing the Alhambra

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.

The Alhambra: The Nasrid Palaces, the Alcazaba and the Generalife

Climb to the castle of the Order of Santiago on the cone above the village

Find the Arab bath house in the village, which is still standing and still recognisable

Find out who Jorge Manrique was and read the Coplas where he was born

Look out over the largest protected area in Spain and work out how far you can actually see

Find the rectangular bullring below the village, which is not the shape bullrings are

Segura de la Sierra stands at over 1,100 metres on a cone of rock inside the Cazorla, Segura and Las Villas natural park, with a castle of the Order of Santiago on the summit and an Arab bath house still standing in the village below. Jorge Manrique, who wrote the Coplas on the death of his father — one of the great poems in Spanish — was born here. The park around it is the largest protected area in Spain, and from the village you can see a very long way into it.

Segura de la Sierra: A Village at the Head of Two Rivers

Walk the wall circuit — about two kilometres of rammed earth and brick with fifty towers

Find the five gates and work out which is Roman and which Muslim work

Work out what the taifa of Niebla was: independent from 1234, reaching to Cape St Vincent, and still holding out after Córdoba and Seville had gone

Cross the old bridge over the Tinto and look at the colour of the water coming down from the mines

Go into the church of Santa María de la Granada, which was a mosque and before that a Visigothic church

Niebla has about two kilometres of almost complete wall in rammed earth and brick, with fifty towers and five gates, wrapped round a small town above the Tinto — the same red river that comes down from the mines. It was capital of a cora under the caliphate and then of the taifa of Niebla, which in 1234 recovered its independence under Abenmahfot and ran from the mouth of the Guadalquivir to Cape St Vincent, taking in much of what is now the Algarve — and held out against Castile for decades after Córdoba and Seville had fallen. Alfonso X finally took it in 1262 after a nine-month siege.