Alcazaba and Walls of San Cristóbal Hill

Few fortresses let you read a city's history as clearly as the Alcazaba of Almería. Perched on an isolated hill, with the city spread out below it to the south and San Cristóbal Hill closing off the horizon to the north, it is the second-largest Moorish alcazaba on the Iberian Peninsula in terms of its Muslim-era enclosure, and one of the citadels that has survived best to the present day.

Its appeal is not just a matter of size. Built in several phases over almost a thousand years, the complex is like an open book on the evolution of civil and military architecture in Al-Andalus, later joined by the castle and towers of the late-medieval Christian period, dating from the 15th and 16th centuries. Walking through it is, to a large extent, tracing the origins and growth of Almería itself.

A sense of solidity stays with you throughout: its walls are more than three metres thick and up to five metres high, forming an enclosure closed in on itself. Yet the Alcazaba was never isolated. Its curtain walls extend outwards and link up with the rest of the town's fortifications, so that the Hoya ravine and San Cristóbal Hill share a direct physical and visual relationship with it. Altogether, counting the late-medieval castle, the alcazaba and the outer walls, the fortified perimeter runs to around 1,430 metres.

This unity of fortress, walls and landscape is what makes a visit more than a stroll among old stones: at a glance you can see how the city was defended and organised. Its symbolic value for Almería is such that in 2010 the Royal Spanish Mint chose its image for the 5-euro coin dedicated to the city as part of its series on provincial capitals.