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
Arabic language influence on the Spanish language of Burgos and La Rioja in what is now northern Spain. However, Toledo in central Spain, which became the capital of the early Kingdom of Castile during its southward expansion, is where Spanish began to appear in a written form recognizable today. The pre-existing Mozarabic dialect of this region (i.e. the Romance present during Muslim rule) is therefore likely to have also had an important formative influence on modern Spanish. The lexical influence of Arabic reached its greatest level during the Christian Reconquista, when the emerging Kingdom of Castile conquered large territories from Moorish rulers particularly in the 11th, 12th