Andalusia Andalusia Andalusia (; ) is an autonomous community in southern Spain. It is the most populous and the second largest in area of the autonomous communities in the country. The Andalusian autonomous community is officially recognised as a "historical nationality". The territory is divided into eight provinces: Almería, Cádiz, Córdoba, Granada, Huelva, Jaén, Málaga and Seville. Its capital is the city of Seville (Spanish: "Sevilla"). Andalusia is located in a privileged area in the south of the Iberian peninsula, in south-western Europe, immediately south of the autonomous communities of Extremadura and Castilla-La Mancha; west of the autonomous community of Murcia
Name of Andalusia to refer those territories still under the Moorish rule until then, and generally south of Castilla Nueva and Valencia, and corresponding with the former Roman province hitherto called Baetica in Latin sources. This was a Castilianization of "Al-Andalusiya", the adjectival form of the Arabic word "al-Andalus". The name "Andalusia" or "Vandalusia" is traditionally believed to be derived from "Vandal", the Germanic tribe that briefly colonized parts of Iberia, from 409 to 429. That derivation goes back to the 13th-century "De rebus Hispaniae" but has been viewed critically from the 18th century. Reinhart Dozy (1860) recognized its shortcomings but still accepted