The corner of Spain where mangos, bananas and avocados grow

Fancy sitting on a beach in the warm December sunshine, eating a prawn and mango salad and drinking locally made rum? The good news is that you don’t have to travel to the Caribbean to do so. Just take a short flight to Andalucia.

The Costa Tropical, in the province of Granada in southern Spain, is a coastline of coves and Moorish watchtowers where a quirk of climate means that dense groves of mangos, avocados, custard apples, bananas and other exotic crops flank the Mediterranean. The protection of the Sierra Nevada and the warm winds blowing over from north Africa create a subtropical microclimate with 320 days of sunshine a year and mild temperatures even in winter.

Sugar cane also grows in abundance (hence the local rum), adding to the Caribbean flavour. A century ago, the sugar industry was such an important part of the economy in the town of Motril that it became known as Little Cuba.

Starting where the Costa del Sol ends, just east of Nerja, this little stretch of Cuba in the Med runs for about 60 miles (95km) to the border with Almería province. Many of the beaches are backed by cliffs and have coarse sand, tinted grey by the granite of the mountains, which creates superb conditions for scuba diving, snorkelling and kayaking. But within an hour, you can be wallowing in the sensual splendour of the Alhambra palace in Granada.

Stay in Salobre?a, a pretty hilltop town with a long beach, where the castle was the summer residence of the Nasrid rulers of the Kingdom of Granada. Or base yourself in Almu?écar, where a Roman fish-salting factory is now part of the lush El Majuelo botanic garden.

Keep driving around the coast and you come across other microclimates, such as Elche in the province of Alicante, where more than 200,000 date palm trees form perhaps the most extraordinary urban park in Spain. It dates back to the 10th century, when Arab settlers constructed irrigation channels and planted palms to make the most of the scarce water resources in this semi-arid region, creating conditions that enabled other crops to grow. It has Unesco World Heritage status.

EasyJet (easyjet.com) and British Airways (ba.com) fly to Malaga, Granada and Almería. Stay at the elegant, 19th-century Casa de los Bates (casadelosbates.com) near Salobre?a and help yourself to tropical fruit from the garden. Doubles from ￡84 with breakfast.

Elche is 15 minutes’ drive from Alicante airport, with flights from most UK airports. Stay among the palms at the delightful Huerto del Cura (hotelhuertodelcura.co.uk). Doubles from ￡93 with breakfast.