Abstract: As an important part of the city's historical memory, traditional villages are not only invaluable cultural heritage of the nation, but also irreplaceable tourism and cultural resources. Nanjing, as one of the first batch of historical and cultural cities in China, boasts a natural landscape pattern integrating 'mountains, rivers, cities, and forests'. This paper attempts to use ArcGIS and spatial regression models as the primary research methods to explore the spatial distribution characteristics and influencing factors of traditional villages within the complex and diverse natural and cultural environment of this historical and cultural city. Firstly, the kernel density and nearest neighbor analysis methods are utilized to analyze the aggregated distribution of 62 traditional villages' location at the urban spatial level. Secondly, five factors, which are elevation, slope direction, water system, transportation, and historical relics, are selected to discuss their spatial coupling characteristics with the distribution of traditional villages. Finally, a spatial regression model (OLS) is established using the ordinary least squares method to quantify the driving factors of village distribution based on each influencing factor. The analysis reveales that the distribution of traditional villages in Nanjing is significantly positively correlated with elevation and the spatial characteristics of historical relics, among which the positive correlation coefficient with historical relics is as high as 0.24. Additionally, there is a significant negative correlation with roads and water systems, and a general positive correlation with slope direction.