Around 1000 or 900 BC, Andalucía's agricultural and mining wealth attracted Phoenician trading colonies to coastal sites such as Cádiz, Huelva and Málaga. In the 8th and 7th centuries BCE, Phoenician influence gave rise to the mysterious, legendarily wealthy Tartesso civilisation, somewhere in western Andalucía.

In Roman times (3rd century BCE to 5th century CE) Andalucía, governed from Córdoba, was one of the most civilised and wealthiest areas of the Roman Empire. Rome imported Andalucian products such as wheat, grapes, olives, copper, silver, lead, fish and garum (a spicy seasoning derived from fish), and Andalucía gave Rome two emperors, Trajan and Hadrian. Andalucía was the obvious base for the Muslim invaders who surged onto the Iberian Peninsula from Africa in AD 711 under Arab general Tariq ibn Ziyad, who landed at Gibraltar with around 10,000 men, mostly Berbers (indigenous North Africans). Córdoba, until the 11th century, then Seville until the 13th and finally Granada until the 15th century, took turns as Islamic Spain's leading city. At its peak in the 10th century, Córdoba was the biggest, most dazzling and cultured city in Western Europe, famed for its 'three cultures': coexistence between Muslims, Jews and Christians. Islamic civilisation lasted longer in Andalucía than anywhere else on the Iberian Peninsula and it's from the medieval name for the Muslim areas of the peninsula, Al-Andalus, that the name Andalucía comes

The Emirate of Granada, the last bastion of Al-Andalus, finally fell to the Catholic Monarchs, Fernando and Isabel, in 1492. Columbus' landing in the Americas the same year brought great wealth to Seville, and later Cádiz, the Andalucian ports through which Spain's trade with the Americas was conducted. But the Castilian conquerors killed off Andalucía's deeper prosperity by handing out great swaths of territory to their nobles, who set sheep to run on former food-growing lands.