Priego de Córdoba

Priego de Córdoba carved the Baroque's Andalusian summit in a mountain town. The sagrario chapel of the Asunción church — an octagon of white stucco worked to lace, light falling through a lantern onto a froth of saints and volutes — is counted among the masterpieces of Spanish Baroque, the crown of a town whose eighteenth-century silk wealth financed church after church until Priego became, per capita, the style's most concentrated address in the south. The Fuente del Rey answers outdoors: a monumental fountain of a hundred and thirty-nine spouts cascading through sculpted basins around Neptune — a royal water garden in a sierra plaza.

The old Moorish quarter, the Barrio de la Villa, hangs its geranium-walled lanes over the Adarve's cliff balcony, the vega and olive sea below: Priego's oil, under its own denomination, wins international prizes with the regularity of a habit, and the town's tourism runs on tastings as much as stucco. Alcalá-Zamora, the Republic's first president, was Priego's son; his house-museum keeps the memory. The concert record's register — bands, choirs, church music, festival programmes — plays against this scenery, with the town's festivals of art and its conservatory tradition adding lustre. Silk money, holy froth, liquid gold: Priego polished every surface it touched.