The giant region of Andalucia, located in southern Spain, is extremely diverse and hard to distill into a few paragraphs. Most Andalusian provinces, however, do share the hot, dry sun and a reputation for being the haunt of poets and artists.

Above all else, it is the remnants of Moorish occupations that typify Andalusia. Between 711 A.D. and the Christian Reconquest of 1492, the Moors hosted the most sophisticated civilization of the Middle Ages in the three major cities of Córdoba, Sevilla and Granada. Each one preserves extraordinarily beautiful monuments of the era, the most notable being Granada's Alhambra palace.

Today, the autonomous region counts the provinces of Almería, Cádiz, Córdoba, Granada, Huelva, Jaén, Málaga, and Seville in its borders. Andalusia is bounded on the south and east by the Mediterranean Sea and Atlantic Ocean and on the west by Portugal.




The regional cities run the gamut from chic resorts like Marbella on the Costa del Sol to more industrial cities like Málaga as well as historical landmarks like Granada or Cordoba.

The capital is the city of Seville, which boasts the Alcazar, a Moorish fortress, and La Giralda, the turret-turned-belltower on the grandiose Gothic cathedral. The city of Mijas is an example of an Andalusian institution, the "white villages," so named because of the omnipresent brilliantly whitewashed houses.

There are too many local hotspots to even begin to describe Andalusia, but no Andalusian guide would be complete without mentioning the ever-present festivals and ferias, the most famous being the giant April Fair in Sevilla, the pilgrimage to El Rocío near Huelva in late May, and the Easter celebrations at Málaga and Sevilla.