Driving Over Lemons by Chris Stewart (1999) — the first of Stewart's trilogy about buying a remote farm in the Alpujarras (on the other side of Málaga province), written by the original drummer of Genesis. Laugh-out-loud funny about the practical realities of rural Andalucía, and gives a vivid sense of the landscape and character of the region that lies directly behind the coast.
South from Granada by Gerald Brenan (1957) — Brenan, a British writer, lived in the village of Yegen in the Alpujarras from 1920 and this book is his account of those years: the village, the people, the customs of Andalucía as it was before the Civil War. The landscape he describes is not far from the Axarquía, and the portrait of rural Andalucían life remains one of the finest in the English language.
The Spanish Labyrinth by Gerald Brenan (1943) — Brenan's more serious attempt to explain Spanish history and the origins of the Civil War. Dense but rewarding for anyone who wants to understand why Andalucía is as it is, why the land ownership patterns produced the social conflicts they did, and why the south of Spain remained so poor for so long.
Winter in Mallorca by George Sand (1855) — Sand's account of her difficult winter in Mallorca with Chopin (not strictly about Andalucía, but about the strangeness of the Catholic south experienced by a northerner). Its sly observations about Spanish character and the gap between the Spain tourists imagine and the Spain that exists have aged better than most 19th-century travel writing.