AT A GLANCE

Why go?

Tucked into the old San Mateo quarter—once the heart of Jerez's Hispanic-Muslim medina—the Municipal Archaeological Museum tells the story of this Andalusian city from its earliest settlers to its wine-boom centuries. Housed in an 18th-century courtyard house on the Plaza del Mercado, it is one of Andalusia's pioneering local museums, with origins that reach back to 1873.↗↗↗↗

Its star attraction is a haunting Greek Corinthian helmet dredged up from the Guadalete River in 1938: hammered from a single sheet of bronze in the early 7th century BC, it ranks among the oldest Greek objects ever found in the West. Around it, the galleries trace a full sequence of civilisations—Copper Age, Roman, Islamic and Christian—through artefacts recovered almost entirely from sites inside Jerez's own municipal territory.↗↗