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Above all else - and there is plenty - it's the great Moorish monuments that compete for your attention in Andalucia . The Moors, a mixed race of Berbers and Arabs who crossed into Spain from Morocco and North Africa, occupied al-Andalus for over seven centuries. Their first forces landed at Tarifa in 710 AD and within four years they had conquered virtually the entire country; their last kingdom, Granada, fell to the Christian Reconquest in 1492. Between these dates they developed the most sophisticated civilization of the Middle Ages, centred in turn on the three major cities of Cordoba, Sevilla and Granada . Each one preserves extraordinarily brilliant and beautiful monuments, of which the most perfect is Granada's Alhambra palace , arguably the most sensual building in all of Europe. Sevilla , not to be outdone, has a fabulously ornamented Alcazar and the greatest of all Gothic cathedrals. Today, Andalucia's capital and seat of the region's autonomous parliament is a vibrant contemporary metropolis that's impossible to resist. Cordoba's exquisite Mezquita , the grandest and most beautiful mosque constructed by the Moors, is a landmark building in world architecture and also not to be missed. These three cities have, of course, become major tourist destinations, but the smaller inland towns of Andalucia are often totally unspoiled. These offer amazing potential; Renaissance towns such as Ubeda, Baeza and Osuna, Guadix with its cave suburb, Moorish Carmona and the stark white hill towns around Ronda , are all easily accessible by local buses. Travelling for some time here you'll also get a feel for the landscape of Andalucia: occasionally spectacularly beautiful but more often impressive on a huge, unyielding scale, distinguished by a patchwork of colours and the interaction of land and buildings, or the gradual appearance of villages grouped beneath a castle and church. The province also takes in mountains - including the Sierra Nevada , Spain's highest range. You can ski here in February, and then drive down to the coast to swim the same day. Perhaps more compelling, though, are the opportunities for walking in the lower slopes, Las Alpujarras . Alternatively, there's good trekking amongst the gentler (and much less-known) hills of the Sierra Morena , north of Sevilla. On the coast it's easy to despair. Extending to either side of Malaga is the Costa del Sol , Europe's most heavily developed resort area, with its beaches hidden behind a remorseless density of concrete hotels and apartment complexes. However, the province takes in two alternatives, much less developed and with some of the best beaches in all Spain. These are the villages between Tarifa and Cadiz on the Atlantic, and those around Almeria on the southeast corner of the Mediterranean. The Almerian beaches allow warm swimming through all but the winter months; those near Cadiz, more easily accessible, are fine from about June to September. Near Cadiz, too, is the Coto de Donana national park, Spain's largest and most important nature reserve, which is home to a spectacular range of flora and fauna. The realities of life in contemporary Andalucia can be stark. Unemployment in the region is the highest in Spain - over twenty percent in many areas - and an even larger proportion of the population is still engaged in agriculture. Rural life is bleak; you soon begin to notice the appalling economic structure, at its most extreme in this part of Spain, of vast absentee-landlord estates and landless peasants. The andaluz villages, bastions of anarchist and socialist groups before and during the Civil War, saw little economic aid or change during the Franco years - or indeed since. For the last twenty years, the province has been an autonomous region with its own parliament and a substantial degree of self-government. The day labourers, jornaleros , earn a precarious living from seasonal work, and as recently as 1986 the regional government instituted land reform in an effort to head off a peasants' revolt. Numerous instances of land occupation have resulted in violent clashes between labourers and the Civil Guard. Throughout the 1990s, tourism, and ventures such as Expo '92 in Sevilla, have brought some changes - above all radical improvements in infrastructure, with new road and rail projects aimed at providing faster connections within the region and with Madrid and Barcelona - but much still remains to be done. For all its poverty however, Andalucia is also Spain at its most exuberant: the home of flamenco and the bullfight, and those wild and extravagant cliches of the Great Spanish Dream. These really do exist and can be absorbed at one of the hundreds of annual fiestas, ferias and romerias . The best of them include the giant April Feria in Sevilla, the ageless pilgrimage to El Rocio near Huelva in late May, and the dramatically moving Semana Santa (Easter) celebrations at Malaga, Granada, Sevilla, Cordoba and Jerez, as well as in countless small villages.
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