Málaga

For decades most travellers saw Málaga only from an airport shuttle, racing past on their way to a resort. Their loss: this is one of Europe's oldest cities, with some 3,000 years of Phoenician, Roman and Moorish history stacked into a walkable seafront centre — and today it hums with more museums per square kilometre than almost anywhere else in Spain. It's an ideal city to wander with self-guided audio tours in your ears, letting each stone tell its story while you set the pace between fortress, cathedral and beach.

Nowhere layers history quite like the slope beneath Mount Gibralfaro. At street level sits the Roman Theatre, built in the 1st century BC and hidden underground until its rediscovery in 1951. Directly above it rise the horseshoe arches and fountain courtyards of the Alcazaba, the 11th-century Moorish fortress-palace, and higher still the ramparts of the Castillo de Gibralfaro, with sweeping views over the port and the Mediterranean — each stop has an audio guide that unpacks what your eyes are seeing. A few streets away stands the cathedral locals call La Manquita, "the one-armed lady", after the south tower that was never finished.

Málaga is where Pablo Picasso was born in 1881, on leafy Plaza de la Merced, and the Museo Picasso Málaga shows more than 200 of his works inside a 16th-century palace. The city has doubled down on that legacy: a colourful glass cube on the waterfront houses the Centre Pompidou Málaga, the Paris museum's first outpost abroad, while the once-gritty Soho district has become an open-air gallery of large-scale street art.

The city's everyday pleasures are just as rewarding. Browse the iron-and-glass Mercado de Atarazanas, built on the site of a Moorish shipyard, then stroll marble-paved Calle Larios — pedestrianised in 2003 and now the city's elegant main promenade — down to the palm-lined Muelle Uno quayside. At Playa de la Malagueta, beach shacks grill espetos, sardines skewered over open coals, best washed down with the region's sweet Moscatel wine. With the vertiginous Caminito del Rey gorge walk about an hour away, Málaga rewards far more than a stopover — give it a few days and let the audio guides fill in three millennia of stories.