Most of the roots of Flamenco can be traced to the rich blend of liturgical and secular music from the East which met the gypsies when they came to the Andalusian region in southern Spain in the 15th century. Andalusia was the breeding ground for the continued development and mixing of Spanish folk music and for the Flamenco song.
In the 10th century, about a million people lived in the city of Cordoba - an incredible blend of races and nationalities, of folk groups with different life styles, languages and cultures. Jews, Arabs, Berbers and Moors lived separately in their ghettos or districts; others, with a higher material standard, lived in palaces. Integration between the immigrants and the native population was, however, unavoidable, and since that time the Andalusian people have been an indistinguishable union of these races. During the following centuries, music and dance developed from this union.

"Andalusia having since antiquity been bathed in all the great Mediterranian cultures, its popular songs present a fascinating amalgam of very complex influences. A combination of poetry and music finds its expression in the very cadences of life, whether religious or secular. Serenades, laments, lullabies, and nursery rhymes; the ballads of mule-drivers, carters and peasants; stree cries, prayers, worksongs, dance tunes and languid love-songs; all coalesce to form the magnificent repertoire of a people whose passion is singing. This rich mixture - which stands in such perfect harmony with nature, white villages, Moorish architecture and complex baroque ornaments - only be chance attracted the name of 'flamenco'. For the musical destiny of the wide-open spaces of southern Spain - the most mystically and cuturally charged territory of the entire peninsula, that area of Lower Andalusia between Seville and Cadiz - was shaped by the presence of an isolated gypsy community" - from "Flamenco's Nights at Librija"