Some 70 years before holiday home buyers latched on, the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca summed up the magic of the white Moorish towns that dot the hillsides of southern Spain. “I breathe for Alcalá de los Gazules,” he wrote of one of the oldest in the region, “for what is intimately Andaluz.”

Today, both natives and foreigners are flocking to the Cádiz province of which Lorca was writing, turning their back on the overbuilt, overpriced and overcrowded Costa del Sol. Besides the area’s striking natural beauty, including a largely undeveloped coastline, it is the iconic pueblos blancos – fortress towns built by the Moors in their battles against the Christians from the eighth century – that are drawing attention and new development. New motorways and an increasing number of budget flights to Jerez, Seville and Gibraltar have aided the migration.