Covering 45,663ha in the southeastern corner of Spain, Cabo de Gata-Níjar is Andalucia's largest coastal protected area, a wild and isolated landscape with some of Europe's most original geological features. The eponymous mountain range is Spain's largest volcanic rock formation with sharp peaks and crags in ochre-hues. It falls steeply to the sea creating jagged 100m-high cliffs, which are riven by gullies leading to hidden coves with white sandy beaches, some of the most beautiful in Andalucía.

Sandwiched between the mountains of the Sierra Nevada, Gador, Filabres and Alhamilla is one of the most dramatic landscapes in Spain, the desolate Desierto de Tabernas. The only semi-desert in Europe; there is a surreal, lunar quality about its wierdly eroded ravines, dry river beds and barren slopes apparently devoid of vegetation, bleached by the sun and occasionally singed with ochre hues. With its poor soils, low rainfall and temperatures that range from -5°C to 48°C, the landscape has been little changed by agriculture or other human activity, with just a few pockets of subsistence farming.
Film makers have long been attracted to its landscape, with its similar appearance to the North American Wild West, and so the desert has been the scene of many a spaghetti western. Visit Mini-Hollywood 7km south of Tabernas, where many westerns were filmed. Clint Eastwood, Raquel Welch, Charles Bronson were all here before the big time movie industry moved on leaving behind their Wild West film set which is now open as a tourist attraction.