Guadalajara, Spain

Guadalajara raised the Mendozas and the Mendozas raised Guadalajara. The great fifteenth-century clan — cardinals, poets, viceroys — made the Castilian town their seat and crowned it with the Palacio del Infantado: the diamond-studded facade and honeycomb gallery of Gothic-Mudéjar invention that is the town's masterpiece and one of Spain's most photographed palaces, wounded by Civil War bombs and restored to its swagger. Each year the town remembers the family's most romantic ghost in the Tenorio Mendocino, staging Don Juan by torchlight through the actual palaces and cloisters on All Saints' eve — theatre using the town as itself.

The playwright the town gave modern Spain has the stage named accordingly: the Teatro Buero Vallejo, documented in the concert record, honours Antonio Buero Vallejo, Guadalajara's son and the conscience of postwar Spanish drama, and hosts the touring opera, concert and theatre seasons in a modern hall worthy of the name. Beyond the town spreads the Alcarria — the honey-scented upland Cela walked into literature in his famous Journey, its lavender fields now a July spectacle — and the town's biscuits (bizcochos borrachos, drunk on syrup) close every argument sweetly. A palace of diamonds, a Don Juan at home, honey on the hills: Guadalajara inherited well and shares it.