The best-known and best-loved of all Spain’s autonomous communities is also the one with most to offer the visitor.

So much more than the land of tapas (tasty as they are), Andalucia has the country’s highest mountains, its sunniest climes, stylish cities, rich wildlife in wetlands, cave dwellings in deserts, no fewer than 22 National Parks and 900 kilometres of coastline.

The Andalusians have a rough sparkle and an enigmatic temperament. It is the land of Picasso and also of Lorca. If the spirit of fiesta lies at their heart, so do the tragic rhythms of flamenco and the art of bullfighting; yet it is the healthy lifestyle and easy-going nature of the people who invented the siesta that is most evident and makes the visitor feel so comfortable. It is no wonder that so many Europeans have relocated here or make it their holiday preference.

To understand this famous and romantically-inclined region of southern Spain, one needs to know the broad strokes of its history, for it is a remarkable one which helps to explain Andalucia’s character, its significance, its art and customs and what you will see in its cities and villages.

Carthaginian warships and merchant vessels ruled the trade routes of the western Mediterranean and controlled most of what is now Spain until Rome’s destruction of Carthage in 146 BC established Roman Baetica in an area more or less equivalent to modern Andalucia.

When the Romans developed agriculture here to guarantee supplies of olive oil and wine to Rome’s overseas legions, two fundamental components of the Mediterranean diet were laid down for all time.

Find out more in our articles about Andalucia Off The Beaten Track

Read our informative local guides for Holidays in Andalucia

The dissolution of Rome brought three hundred years of unresolved conflict to the region under the barbaric and disunited Visigoths and Vandals, so that when Islam’s newest converts, the Berbers of north-west Africa, crossed the narrow straits to invade Spain in 711 AD, their conquest was largely bloodless and even welcomed by many towns and settlements, weary of the fighting.

As ambassadors of Islam from the Middle East, these Moors brought with them a wealth of culture in mathematics, poetry, astronomy, medicine, philosophy, architecture and music, including the reintroduction of works of the ancient Greeks in translation. As a result, the Moorish conquest that occupied the larger part of the Iberian peninsular in a region they called Al-Andalus created centres of learning and sophistication unrivalled anywhere in Europe, with the capital at Cordoba becoming renowned for its wealth, its scholarship and its modernity.

Cordoba had streetlighting, paved streets and sewerage drains, hammam baths, libraries, musical and artistic excellence, not to mention toothpaste and deodorant, at a time when London was little more than a town of mud huts.

It was, for a while at least, a stable, peaceful society in which Jews and Christians were permitted as “people of the book” to practise their religion by their Moslem rulers. Here, and in other cities such as Granada and Seville, ground was broken for European civilization as harmonious laws and building transformed the social and physical world. When you visit the astonishing palaces of the Alhambra in Granada, the Great Mosque of Cordoba or the Giralda Tower in Seville, you are seeing the lasting manifestations this enlightened culture.

Moorish rule ended with the fall of Granada in 1492, after which the Christian kings and queens of a united Spain went about changing the architectural and mental landscape of what would become Andalucia according their own worldview.

Mosque minarets were converted to church towers and the last of the Moors took refuge in the high mountain villages of La Alpujarra, where the curiously flat-roofed houses are clearly based on Berber equivalents in Morocco. Catholicism became rooted in Andalusian consciousness where it remains to this day. Easter processions, with their pomp and multitudes, are momentous ritual expressions of the faith that the visitor is urged to experience whether in city or village, anywhere from Cadiz to Almeria.

Moslem and Jewish influences are still excitingly felt in the art of flamenco in music and dance which Andalusia’s gypsy population has more or less appropriated as their own. If Andalucia today is about sun and warmth, it is also about this kind of passion and spontaneity. Flamenco is flourishing with new generations of singers and dancers and the immediacy of its heart-rending declarations may well strike your ear at some point during your stay, unless you stick to the coast, where European and American pop is the standard musical diet.

The beaches remain sandy and the sun pours always down, but over-development at coastal resorts have brought them to saturation point, so that more and more holidaymakers these days look inland for accommodation with a different aesthetic and settings with a more natural feel.

You don’t have to look far: nearly one fifth of Andalucia’s massive territory is made up of protected reserves and parkland, where rural tourism fits in with environmental planning to provide a truly satisfying holiday experience.

At Rustical Travel, we offer a great selection of individually hand-picked holiday homes that will allow you to explore the very best of Andalucia.

But the landscape varies enormously, from baked desert to snowy mountains, so let’s take a look at the most visited rural areas of Andalucia to see what makes them so popular:

Guide to Ronda Mountains & Grazalema
Guide to La Axarquia & Antequera
Guide to Las Alpujarras
Guide to Sierra de Aracena