Málaga

Picasso was born in Málaga in 1881 and left at ten, so the city waited out the twentieth century for its own name. The museum only opened in 2003, the others followed, the Moorish fortress was cleaned up and half the centre went car-free.

The Picasso Museum sits in the sixteenth-century Buenavista Palace, into which eighteen old houses of the Jewish quarter were folded. The core of the collection is a hundred and fifty-five works given by Christine and Bernard Ruiz-Picasso — paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints and ceramics. Below all of it, through a glass floor, lie a Phoenician wall, a Roman garum factory and part of a Nasrid palace. The basement is a museum in its own right and comes with the same ticket, and most visitors walk straight past it.

The Alcazaba and Gibralfaro castle are one system. The Alcazaba is a palace-fortress covering fifteen thousand square metres today, less than half its old footprint, raised over an earlier Phoenician-Punic fort; a walled corridor called the Coracha links it to the castle on the hilltop. A joint ticket for both is €10, one on its own €7. The Roman theatre sits at the foot of it, which puts Phoenicians, Rome, Moorish Spain and everything after 1487 on a single hill.

August is the one month to avoid, for two reasons at once: the Feria falls in the middle of it, and so does the peak of the heat. If you want museums and an empty Alcazaba, come in March, April or October — the winter here is mild and the city works normally through it.