This is Southern Spain without postcards. Beyond the white villages and crowded monuments lies a landscape shaped by erosion, empire, and experiment—where cathedrals grow slowly from the land, people live underground by choice, and Roman theatres wait centuries to be rediscovered beneath modern streets. From Julius Caesar’s veteran colonies to Renaissance fortresses hiding Italian palaces, from abandoned iron mines to deserts that became the Wild West of European cinema, the Guadix–Tabernas region tells Spain’s story sideways. It is a place where history is layered rather than restored, and where film crews came not to invent fantasy, but to borrow it from the land itself. This guide is an invitation to wander off the obvious route—to follow rusted rail lines, sun-cut ravines, and half-buried stones into a version of Andalucía that feels raw, cinematic, and quietly radical.

Holly Golightly