Malaga tourist information

Malaga is the fifth largest city in Spain in terms of population. It is located in the south of the Iberian Peninsula, in a privileged natural enclave. Its municipal area covers an area of 398.25 square kilometres and its population is close to 568,000 inhabitants, although the metropolitan area is close to one million.

The environmental and geographical factors that have had the most notable influence on the development and evolution of the city have been the marine influence, the location of the municipality on two river valleys (Guadalhorce and Guadalmedina), its orography and its climatic regime.

The Mediterranean Sea bathes its coasts and the mountains of Malaga surround it, forming a mountainous barrier that protects it from the cold, its climate being characterised by its mild temperatures thanks to the role of the sea as a thermal regulator. The warmest months are July and August and the coldest are usually December and February. In any case, the average temperatures range between 22.8ºC maximum and 13ºC minimum. The distribution of rainfall in Malaga is fairly well defined by the seasons, with the highest rainfall in autumn and winter.

Malaga's climate is very mild in winter, with very mild minimum temperatures. Summers are moderate due to the city's proximity to the sea. Rainfall is low. The heaviest rainfall occurs between November and March, with the summer being very dry.

Malaga has an average of 2,901 hours of sunshine per year. This, together with its mild temperatures, makes Malaga's climate ideal in winter and very pleasant in autumn and spring.

Malaga has become a true City of Museums. With a total of 38, most of them concentrated in the historic centre, it is one of the cities with the highest density of museums in its old town.

The Picasso Museum Malaga has become a must-see for all those who decide to visit the city of Malaga, being the most visited museum in Andalusia. Inaugurated in 2003, the museum reflects almost eight decades of Pablo Picasso's work, fulfilling the desire to offer his hometown a part of the fruit of his talent. The Collection of more than two hundred works, periodically renewed, provides a thematic and chronological overview of the artist's career.

A cocktail in the central courtyard, a guided tour behind closed doors, a conference in the Auditorium, an art workshop for adults.

The Museo Picasso Málaga offers a wide range of possibilities for holding corporate events.

Located in the Palacio de Buenavista, in the heart of the city's historic centre, the American Institute of Architects awarded the Museum with the Institute Honor Awards for Architecture. The jury highlighted "the beautifully simple architectural restoration work, which has embroidered a museum into the fabric of this Mediterranean city. The new sections have been simply and elegantly inserted into the environment and surroundings of a 16th century palace, outdoor courtyards and city streets".

The Museo Carmen Thyssen Málaga's permanent collection houses an extraordinary survey of 19th- and early 20th-century Spanish painting, in which Andalusian landscape and genre scenes are particularly prominent. These works form part of Baroness Carmen Thyssen's most personal collection and make up a group of more than 200 pieces that also includes a carefully chosen selection of Old Masters from between the 13th and 18th centuries.

The Centre Pompidou Malaga offers a journey through the art of the 20th and 21st centuries with selected works from the incomparable collection of the Centre Pompidou, one of the two most important in the modern and contemporary world.

This journey through the history of art, which is periodically renewed, is also nourished each year by two to three temporary exhibitions plus a multidisciplinary event, Hors Pistes, together with new proposals every six months in the Espace Public Jove-Exhibition-Workshop.

The experience at the Centre Pompidou Malaga is lived through multidisciplinary programmes dedicated to dance, performance, the spoken word and film, with the help of mediation devices aimed above all at young audiences.

The Cube, which houses the Centre Pompidou Malaga, has thus become a living, participatory facility in which workshops, training and dissemination activities generate a strong sense of creative community. Among its missions and priorities, this facility reaffirms its role as a platform for exchanges between society and contemporary creation.

The Museum of Malaga is a state institution managed by the Junta de Andalucía, the result of the administrative union in 1972 of two former provincial museums: the Museum of Fine Arts and the Archaeological Museum. It has more than 15,000 archaeological collections and an extensive art collection of 2,000 works from the 15th century to contemporary art. It is one of the largest provincial museums in Spain and Andalusia.

Its headquarters is the Palacio de la Aduana, a neoclassical building designed in 1788, reminiscent of Italian Renaissance palaces, with four bays around a central porticoed courtyard. In addition to being the Maritime Customs House, it was also the Tobacco Factory and administrative headquarters, housing the Subdelegation of the Provincial Government.

In recent decades, pieces from the excavations carried out by the University of Malaga have been added. In the same way, various batches have been deposited from the abundant preventive and emergency archaeological interventions that have been carried out over the last 20 years in the city centre of Malaga.

The Museum exhibits, under a single narrative that explains how in the 19th century the art and archaeology collections were formed in the context of industrial and bourgeois Malaga, a succession of themes from prehistory to contemporary art, giving the building of the Customs House itself an important role. The exhibition is completed with a history of the institution itself and a visitable warehouse which, as a pioneering experience, is part of the public visit.

The archaeological collection, organised into seven thematic blocks, is notable for its unique pieces such as the Lorinigiana collection, the Neanderthal bone remains from Zafarraya, the lithic collections from Nerja, the grave goods from the Dolmens, the Phoenician tombs from Chorreras or Calle Refino, the Roman mosaic of the Birth of Venus from Cártama or the ceramic and medieval woodwork from the Alcazaba.

In the art collection, although the Museum has some religious works from the 16th to 17th centuries attributed to Luis de Morales, Murillo, Escuela de Rivera or Pedro de Mena, it is particularly notable for its 19th century painting collection, an exponent of the local school and works that are representative of the national scene. The former Museum of Fine Arts was inaugurated at the beginning of the 20th century as a museum of modern art. In the Malaga school, the marine paintings of Emilio Ocón and José Gartner, Antonio Reina Manescau, Bernardo Ferrandiz, Denis Belgrano, José Nogales, Antonio Muñoz Degrain, José Moreno Carbonero and Enrique Simonet with his emblematic work Y tenía corazón (And He Had a Heart) stand out. The historical avant-garde also has a reference point in the collection of José Moreno Villa, Joaquín Peinado and the graphic work of Picasso. The exhibition is completed with a room dedicated to local contemporary art with reference to the generations from the fifties to the eighties and a temporary room with works on paper.

The history of Malaga has its roots in various civilisations and cultures that have left an indelible mark and a legacy of enormous value.

With nearly 3,000 years of history, the city is home to Phoenician, Roman and Arab remains.

This route provides an insight into history through a tour of the main archaeological remains of each of these civilisations.

Phoenician Malaga: Malaka

Between the 8th and 3rd centuries BC, the Phoenician city was founded on the high ground of the Alcazaba, the Cathedral and San Agustín.

The main archaeological remains found from ancient Phoenician and Punic Malaka are the sanctuary in Cistercian Street dating from the 7th century BC, the defensive wall (6th century BC) and a tomb, built with large sandstone ashlars and which appeared with the complete grave goods, in the area of El Ejido, dating from the 6th century BC).

Roman Malaga: Roman Theatre

The Roman Empire settled in Malaga around the 3rd century BC and 7th century AD.

The main monument of the period that has survived to the present day is the Roman Theatre, dating from the 1st century AD.

Next to it, under Alcazabilla Street, are the remains of a garum factory from the late Roman period (3rd-5th century), which can be visited from the basement of the Picasso Museum. Other remains of a salted fish factory can also be seen under the rectorate of the University of Malaga.

Like the Picasso Museum, the basements of the Museo Carmen Thyssen house archaeological remains. In this case, it is a Roman villa from the 1st century BC.

Muslim Malaga: Alcazaba

Muslim Malaga has left an important legacy, especially related to its system of fortifications. Of all these remains and monuments, the Alcazaba is the most important.

The Alcazaba is a fortified palace founded in the 11th century, located in the upper city and where the administrative and political-military power of the time was concentrated.

In the present-day Mercado de Atarazanas, outside the medina, the old Atarazanas were located, and its main gate is a faithful testimony to the Nasrid kingdom (14th century).

The presence of Muslim buildings in the city is constant. This can be seen, for example, in the many remains found of the city wall, which even today still delimits the historic centre of the city.

Gastronomy

Most experts on Malaga cuisine agree in highlighting the simplicity of the ingredients used, the variety and richness of its dishes and their special flavour. All these characteristics are simply the result of the optimal use of the best natural products used in the preparation of its extensive recipe book; a recipe book, by the way, that perfectly adheres to the Mediterranean diet, so well known for its more than demonstrable healthy qualities.

Pulses, vegetables, meat, fish and fruit are the basic elements of an increasingly refined gastronomy, in the preparation of which olive oil is an essential ingredient, a product that in Malaga has reached the highest levels of quality and is marketed all over the world thanks to companies that have made innovation and prestige their distinguishing marks.

Today, the city of Malaga boasts a cuisine of the highest level, which has managed to blend the land and the sea in its dishes. All the products available in the city combine tradition and the avant-garde, the image of quality and naturalness, making Malaga's cuisine stand out as one of the most outstanding in the country, a reflection of the quality of life to be found in Malaga. Thus, in Malaga it is easy to enjoy everything from the most traditional and local dishes to the most select and sophisticated.

Thanks to the importance of quality and prestigious centres, such as La Cónsula hotel and catering school, Malaga has produced outstanding chefs, some of whom, such as Dani García and José Carlos García, have been awarded Michelin stars. The former has also become a great ambassador for Malaga's cuisine, to the point that his restaurant 'Manzanilla' offers the possibility of tasting the best of our dishes in the heart of the Big Apple. Such successes are nothing more than a reflection of the quality of our diet, declared by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site.

In recent years, our city has experienced a formidable qualitative leap in terms of the variety and wealth of ways of understanding cuisine. A series of new restaurants have placed Malaga on the national scene in terms of signature cuisine. These chefs have enriched the city's gastronomic offer from haute cuisine to mixed cuisine to such an extent that today we can undoubtedly speak of a new generation of restaurateurs who offer us a new facet of the city's gastronomic offer.

In a city of just over 550,000 inhabitants there are almost 4,000 catering establishments, of which more than a thousand are restaurants, which gives a slight idea of the fact that gastronomy has become an art form in Malaga. Thus, in the historic centre, next to ancient monuments such as the Alcazaba or the Roman Theatre, in the hidden streets of the old Jewish quarter or in the shadow of the Picasso Museum and the Cathedral, almost three hundred restaurants offer visitors the opportunity to enjoy a cuisine steeped in history. It is not in vain that more than two thousand years ago the Romans made the famous garum in our city.

The good weather that the city boasts has also encouraged what is now a tradition among the people of Malaga: going out into the streets to have a tapa with a good wine or a glass of beer. As a result of this custom, a large number of bodegas and taverns have sprung up, where locals and visitors alike enjoy life on their terraces.

Tapas is a wise formula for trying everything, or almost everything, and not out of gluttony but, let's say, out of culinary curiosity. Variety is the spice of life. In this gastronomic segment you will find everything: from the most traditional and perfect tapas to the most imaginative innovations. It is not necessary to recommend any particular tapa because each establishment can be a world of variants (no two ensaladillas from Malaga taste the same). You have to let your intuition guide you. Or, rather, by taste.

As a traditional dish of Mediterranean cuisine, pescaíto frito (fried fish) is one of the great gastronomic attractions of the coast of Málaga. Typical of chiringuitos, bars and terraces, its demand soars during the sun and beach seasons. The ideal fish for frying has to have certain essential characteristics, characteristics which are perfectly met by the star species for frying: the Malaga anchovy. And along with fried fish, another masterpiece of Malaga gastronomy: espeto, the traditional way of eating sardines in Malaga. The sardines, nailed -or espetadas- on a reed, are placed on the fire, which gives them a special and unique flavour.

As in any big city, in Malaga you can also find a wide variety of cuisines from other latitudes: the traditional ones and the more exotic ones, as Malaga is also a cosmopolitan city in this respect.

Finally, no one can leave Malaga without discovering a magnificent treasure that is often little known. Malaga is privileged to have one of the best cake menus in the country. Whether they are our own, reinvented, new creations or imported, the sweet hand of our master pastry chefs takes shape in true explosions of flavour and colour. One of the most pleasant moments you can experience in our city is sitting down to one of these wonders on any terrace or simply sitting on a bench with your cake wrapped in a napkin, just watching the people go by.

The same applies to our ice cream parlours: cream ice cream extends the aforementioned pastry art to the cold temperatures of a whole immense variety of flavours.

Malaga wines

The wines of Malaga are also of great importance. With a long history, Malaga wines were highly celebrated even in the court of Tsarina Catherine the Great. Fabulous in every way, the wines of Malaga display an explosion of colours, aromas and flavours that give the city a distinctive style and personality. Many of them can be enjoyed as a dessert, accompanying pastries of singular quality, whether they are made with natural fruits or complex products.

Malaga" is a wine historically linked to the arts. Its uniqueness and noble ancestry have made it the subject of numerous literary references. Written mentions of the wines produced in Malaga's benign climate date back to Roman times, although it was not until the Muslim presence in the land of paradise, Malaga, or as its poets also called it, crown of the moon, hidden treasure or city of health, that wine became the literary inspiration for numerous authors.

Finally, there are many alternatives to spend a pleasant afternoon and evening in the city. We can find numerous bars and music bars, as well as many terraces in different buildings, open to the public to enjoy your stay in our city.