Spain

Albarracín in Teruel wraps a Guadalaviar river loop at 1,171 m, its salmon-pink medieval walls nearly intact, surrounded by UNESCO-listed Neolithic rock art.

Alquézar in Huesca sits on a limestone spur above the Río Vero canyon, its name from the Arabic al qasr, with a Collegiate church founded in 1099.

Aínsa in the Sobrarbe Pyrenees commands a promontory at two rivers' confluence, its 11th-century walled old town the former capital of the Kingdom of Sobrarbe.

Besalú in Girona, former capital of the County of Besalú, is defined by its 12th-century Romanesque bridge over the Fluvià and a rare restored medieval mikveh.

Capileira at 1,436 m in Las Alpujarras, Sierra Nevada, is the highest village in the Poqueira gorge and the standard base for climbing Mulhacén.

Comillas pairs a medieval core with an unusual concentration of late-19th-century modernist architecture, including El Capricho, one of only a handful of buildings Antoni Gaudí completed outside Catalonia.

Frigiliana in the Málaga Axarquía preserves Andalusia's best Moorish barrio, its street panels depicting the 1569 last stand of the Morisco population.

Frías holds the formal, centuries-old title of Spain's smallest city, granted by King Juan II in 1435.

Grazalema is the highest of the white villages of the Sierra de Cádiz, set inside Spain's wettest natural park.

La Alberca was the first village in Spain to be granted national historic-monument status, in 1940.

Liérganes sits on the Miera river beneath a row of grand 'indiano' mansions, built by villagers who returned wealthy from the Americas.

Morella in Castellón at 1,004 m is enclosed by its original 2,500-metre medieval walls, crowned by a castle above a 14th-century Gothic basilica.

Potes sits at the confluence of four valleys in the Picos de Europa, its medieval bridges and a fortified tower marking the gateway into the mountain range.

Puebla de Sanabria in Zamora commands a hilltop with a 15th-century frontier castle above the Tera river, gateway to Iberia's largest glacial lake.

Santillana del Mar's historic center is closed to motor vehicles, its stone streets unchanged enough to have earned the town the nickname 'the town of three lies' — it is neither holy, flat, nor by the sea.

Setenil de las Bodegas is built directly under and into overhanging rock along the Rio Trejo canyon, with entire streets sheltered by stone ceilings rather than open sky.

Zahara de la Sierra is built beneath a Moorish castle ruin, overlooking a turquoise reservoir that floods what was once the valley floor below — one of the smaller and steeper of the Cádiz pueblos blancos.