Málaga, Spain

Málaga rewards a slower visit than its airport suggests. The Alcazaba, begun in the middle of the eleventh century under Hammudid rule and extended by the Nasrids, climbs the hillside in a double ring of walls, with courtyards, horseshoe arches and water channels surviving largely intact — the most complete Muslim palace-fortress on the Spanish coast. Above it, the Gibralfaro castle, raised by Yusuf I of Granada in the fourteenth century on the site of a Phoenician lighthouse, gives the best view in the city: the harbour, the bullring, and the mountains behind. The Roman theatre uncovered at the Alcazaba's foot in 1951 sets the two eras in a single frame. The old town below is compact and walkable, with the unfinished cathedral the city calls La Manquita — the one-armed lady, for the south tower that was never built — at its centre, and the Picasso Museum in the Buenavista palace nearby. Along the front, La Malagueta beach and the Muelle Uno promenade give an Andalusian journey its one stretch of sea, and the evenings stay mild well into autumn.