Day trips from Seville

For roughly a century Cordoba was the largest city in Western Europe and the seat of a caliphate. What survives is a dense, walkable old town of whitewashed lanes, flower-filled courtyards and a Roman bridge, with the Mosque-Cathedral at its centre: a forest of red and white arches with a Renaissance cathedral built into the middle of it.

It is the closest of the great Andalusian cities to Seville, which is what makes it the easiest single day trip. Two versions run, and both stop at the white town of Carmona on the way. The difference is the monument itself: one includes admission to the Mosque-Cathedral, and the other walks the Juderia and the courtyards without going inside it, which is why it costs less.

Granada was the last Muslim capital in Spain, and the Alhambra was handed over intact in 1492 rather than destroyed. It is not one building but a walled city on a hill: a fortress, three royal palaces and a summer garden, with the peaks of the Sierra Nevada behind it.

Alhambra tickets are issued in the name of each visitor and the Nasrid Palaces sell out weeks ahead, so the version that includes admission is the one to take if the monument is why you are going. The other walks the Albaicin, the old Moorish quarter facing it across the valley, and is the cheaper way to see the city.

The white villages sit along what was once the frontier between Castile and the Nasrid kingdom, which is why so many of them are called de la Frontera and so many have a castle above them. Zahara de la Sierra is stacked up a crag between a reservoir and the mountains; Grazalema sits in the wettest range in Spain.

Ronda itself straddles a gorge more than a hundred metres deep, crossed by an eighteenth-century bridge. Both versions stop at a traditional olive oil mill with a tasting; the difference is Ronda itself. The classic route walks the town from the outside, and the monumental one adds the Ronda Tourist Pass, which opens the Puente Nuevo, the Arab Baths and three more monuments.

Cadiz has the strongest claim to being the oldest city in Western Europe: Phoenicians founded it around 1104 BC and it has been lived in ever since. It sits on a spit of land almost surrounded by water, which is why it feels like nowhere else in Andalusia. Jerez, half an hour inland, gave sherry its English name.

Three versions of the same route, and the difference is what you stop for. The base one is the two city centres and the Atlantic. The second adds a sherry cellar with a tasting. The third adds the equestrian ballet at the Royal Andalusian School of Equestrian Art in Jerez as well.

The only day trip on this page that puts you on another continent. The road runs south to Tarifa, the southernmost point of mainland Europe, and the fast ferry crosses the Strait of Gibraltar in about an hour.

On the Moroccan side: the Caves of Hercules, whose sea-facing mouth is shaped like a map of Africa, camels on the Atlantic shore, the old medina on foot and a traditional Moroccan lunch, which is included. A valid passport is compulsory and a national ID card is not enough.

A walkway a metre wide, pinned to the vertical wall of the Gaitanes gorge about a hundred metres above the river. It was built for hydroelectric workers in 1905, fell apart, spent years with a reputation as the most dangerous footpath in Europe, and reopened rebuilt in 2015.

Admission and the compulsory helmet are included. The route runs one way only and cannot be turned back on, children under 8 are not admitted by rule of the site itself, and if heights are a real problem for you this is not the day to choose.

A few square kilometres of Britain attached to the south of Spain, with a 426-metre block of limestone rising out of it and the coast of Africa visible across the water. Red telephone boxes, duty-free shops and a passport control on the way in.

The Rock Tour is included: entry to the Nature Reserve, the viewpoint over the Strait, St Michael Cave and the Barbary macaques, the only wild monkey population in Europe. Bring your passport, because a national ID card is not reliably accepted here.

The largest area of Western Europe with no roads running through it: a mosaic of marshland, pine woods, moving dunes and thirty kilometres of undeveloped beach, where a great many of the birds migrating between Europe and Africa stop to feed.

The interior is closed to private vehicles, which is the reason to come with a tour rather than alone: the route crosses a restricted area in a 4x4. Binoculars are included. The lynx is the emblem of the park and almost nobody sees one, which the trip page says plainly rather than promising otherwise.

The southern tip of the continent, where the Atlantic meets the Mediterranean and the Moroccan coast fills the horizon. Two very different days run down here.

One is cultural: the walled town of Tarifa, the Roman city of Baelo Claudia standing on the sand at Bolonia, the white village of Vejer de la Frontera and the centre of Cadiz. The other is simply a beach day, with transport there and back and the whole of it free.

North of Seville the land rises into green oak pasture that produces the best Iberian ham in Spain, with one of the finest caves in the country running underneath the hilltop town of Aracena: a kilometre of chambers and still underground lakes, open to visitors since 1914.

Both versions include the cave. One adds the dehesa where the Iberian pigs are reared, with a tasting. The other continues to Riotinto, where five thousand years of mining have left terraced red rock and a river the colour of rust that NASA studies as an analogue for Mars.

Six trips run to about four hours and have you back in Seville with most of the day still ahead of you. They are the ones to pair with a morning or an afternoon in the city rather than to spend instead of one.

Carmona is a town on a ridge that has been lived in for five thousand years, with a Roman necropolis you go down into. Italica was the first Roman city founded outside Italy and has an amphitheatre built for 25,000. The other four go out into the countryside: a working olive estate, a winery, a fighting bull ranch and a horse ride.