The white villages (pueblos blancos) of Andalusia

The most dramatic of the white towns, Ronda sits astride a 120-metre gorge called El Tajo in the province of Málaga. The Puente Nuevo, an 18th-century stone bridge, spans the chasm and links the old Moorish quarter to the newer town beside one of Spain's oldest bullrings.

In the Cádiz sierra, Setenil de las Bodegas built itself into the rock rather than on top of it. Along streets like Cuevas del Sol, whole rows of white houses shelter under a single massive overhang, the cliff forming their roofs and back walls.

Zahara de la Sierra crowns a peak on the northern edge of the Sierra de Grazalema Natural Park in the province of Cádiz. A ruined Moorish keep tops the village, which looks straight down onto the turquoise Zahara–El Gastor reservoir.

Arcos de la Frontera rides a sheer sandstone ridge above a loop of the Guadalete River in the province of Cádiz. Its tangle of cobbled lanes climbs to a castle and the cliff-edge church of San Pedro; the whole old town is a listed national monument.

Vejer de la Frontera stands on a hilltop inland from the Costa de la Luz in the province of Cádiz, its medieval layout of arches and whitewashed lanes kept almost intact. From the top, views run out over the Barbate valley toward the Atlantic.

Olvera cascades down a steep hill in the Sierra de Cádiz beneath an unmistakable silhouette: a 12th-century Moorish castle and the twin-towered neoclassical church of Nuestra Señora de la Encarnación, side by side at the summit.

Above Nerja on the eastern Costa del Sol, Frigiliana keeps one of the best-preserved Moorish quarters in the province of Málaga. Its steep, stepped barrio morisco is a maze of whitewashed walls, deep-blue doors and flower pots on the slopes of the Sierra Almijara.

Zuheros hangs off a craggy spur in the Sierras Subbéticas Natural Park in the province of Córdoba, its white houses set against grey limestone cliffs and a ruined castle. Nearby, the Cueva de los Murciélagos preserves Neolithic wall paintings.

Iznájar sits on a promontory in the province of Córdoba, all but ringed by Andalusia's largest reservoir. A Moorish castle tops the village, whose flower-filled courtyards — the prize-winning Patio de las Comedias among them — spill blue pots and geraniums down the lanes.

At about 1,050 metres in the Alpujarra of the province of Granada, Pampaneira is the first of the three villages of the Poqueira Gorge, below the Sierra Nevada. Its box-shaped houses with flat clay roofs and Berber chimneys echo the mountain villages of Morocco's Atlas.

Also in the Granada Alpujarra, Soportújar leaned into local legend: since 2006 the village has reinvented itself around witches (brujas), with brooms, black cats and a witch cave woven through its whitewashed Moorish-era streets.

Deep in the Genal Valley of the Serranía de Ronda, in the province of Málaga, tiny Genalguacil is an open-air art museum. Since 1994 an art festival has left more than 200 sculptures and murals scattered through its whitewashed streets and chestnut-forested hills.