Spain

7 tours from £875^pp

For thousands of years Spain was one of Europe’s leading cultural centres, it now ranks third on the list of countries with the most Unesco World Heritage Sites. Occupying 85% of Europe’s strategically important Iberian Peninsula, Spain is a stunning showcase of the legacies from Carthaginians and Romans who fought over it, the Arabs who conquered it and Catholic Monarchs who recovered it and made Spain into the most powerful empire in the world. Though the 20th century saw Spanish civil war, the country escaped the destruction wrought by the wars that raged throughout Europe. Today Spain’s historic towns and cities are extraordinary living museums with castles and palaces from its Moorish past, striking Gothic cathedrals and great mosques standing alongside fantastic modernist monuments from the creative spirits of Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso and Antoni Gaudí.

It was Spain’s popular Mediterranean coast that made the country a holiday hotspot, yet it has a beautiful and diverse landscape. The rugged mountains of the Pyrenees and Sierra Nevada, lush plains of the Rioja, wetlands of the Doñana National Park and Cabo de Gata, the only desert in Mainland Europe where the hills that drop down to the coast are long extinct volcanoes.

Andalusia, with its pretty, white-washed, hilltop villages, is often referred to as the heart of Spain for it is the cradle of bullfighting and embraces the traditions of tapas, fiesta and flamenco. A cruise on the River Guadalquivir is a chance to discover the richest of Spanish heritage.