Guarromán

The olive trucks rattle through Guarromán at first light, heading south to the Coín bottling plants with last night’s harvest. Stand on the Calle Real at 7 a.m. and you’ll count twenty pass in ten minutes—each one leaving a faint scent of crushed leaves and peppery oil hanging in the cool air. That smell tells you everything you need to know about this place: it exists because of olives, not for tourists.

Most British drivers know the town only as a blur of green signs between Bailén and Córdoba. The A-4 slips past the western edge, so the majority of Guarromán’s visitors arrive with stiff legs and a fuel gauge in the red, not with guidebooks. Pull off, fill up at the Repsol (consistently 8–10 c cheaper per litre than motorway services), order a café con leche at the station bar, and you’ve already done what 90 % of foreign traffic does here. Stay for an hour longer, though, and the place starts to show a different face.

A Planned Town that Never Quite Escaped the Plan

Guarromán is not a whitewashed hill village. It is a 1950s settlement built to service the vast olive cooperatives that stretch north-east towards the Sierra Morena. The grid of straight streets just off the main road was laid out by agronomists, not poets, and the architecture is functional: single-family houses with flat roofs and built-in garages for the first wave of mechanised farmers. The only genuinely old fragment is the Iglesia de la Inmaculada Concepción, a modest sixteenth-century church transplanted stone by stone from an earlier hamlet two kilometres away when the new town was decreed. Inside, the air is cool and smells of candle wax rather than engine oil; a retable carved in 1640 still keeps its original paint because the local congregation has never been large enough to afford gilding it.

Walk two blocks east and you hit the Plaza de Andalucía, a rectangle of bare concrete decorated with one elderly palm and a bandstand used once a year. Elderly men in flat caps occupy the benches in strict rotation; the same faces appear at 11 a.m., disappear for lunch, then re-emerge at 5 p.m. with different newspapers. It is the sort of social timetable that makes British market towns look hysterically busy.

Olive Groves that Go Full Circle

Behind the church a minor road signs itself simply Vía Verde. It’s a reclaimed railway track that once carried the harvest to Linares; now it’s a level cycle path that cuts straight through the groves for 17 km. Rent a bike from the petrol-station attendant (€15 a day, leave your passport as deposit) and within five minutes the town hum is replaced by the click of sprinklers and the mechanical chirp of irrigation sensors. The trees here are a thousand years old—gnarled silver trunks the width of a London bus—and the farmers still harvest by laying canvas nets and vibrating the branches with long electric rakes. October smells of sap and wet earth; March is all blossom and bees. There are no entrance fees, no interpretation boards, no gift shop. Just turn round when you’ve had enough and freewheel back for a beer.

What to Eat When You’re Not in a Service Station

British stomachs, scarred by years of A-road sandwiches, tend to approach Spanish roadside food with caution. Guarromán rewards the brave. On the north side of the plaza, Restaurante Las Tinajas serves a weekday menú del día that costs less than a Pret wrap: €12 buys soup or salad, a plate of judías blancas with chorizo, pork cheek in tomato, and a saucer of arroz con leche thick enough to stand a spoon in. House wine comes in a 200 ml glass bottle sealed with a crown cap—rough, but it does the job. If you need something faster, the Yuma steakhouse by the roundabout will grill a 1 kg T-bone to medium-rare without raising an eyebrow; chips arrive in a wire basket and the pepper sauce tastes of actual pepper rather than flour. Vegetarians should head for the bakery opposite the town hall: ask for empanadilla de calabaza and they’ll warm the pumpkin pasty in the pizza oven.

Sunday is another matter. The cooperative restaurants close at 4 p.m. on Saturday and don’t reopen until Monday lunchtime. The only calories available come from the petrol-station shop: crisps, napolitanas filled with vague custard, and beer kept at blood temperature. Plan ahead or you will be hungry.

A Festival Calendar Dictated by Tractors

Guarromán’s big day is 15 May, the Feria de San Isidro. The patron saint of agriculture is paraded through the streets on a trailer towed by the newest John Deere in the district, sprigs of rosemary tucked under the windscreen wipers for blessing. By 11 a.m. the plaza smells of gunpowder and aniseed from the churros stand; by 2 p.m. the mayor is handing out bottles of local olive oil to anyone who can prove their tractor is over thirty years old. Visitors are welcome, but there are no bilingual programmes or wristbands—just turn up, keep your elbows in during the procession, and accept the plastic cup of fino someone hands you.

December brings the fiestas of the Inmaculada. On the 7th the town band, which consists of twelve teenagers and one retired army drummer, marches through the streets playing the same pasodoble for two hours. At 9 p.m. precisely the lights draped across the plaza are switched on; they stay up until Epiphany, by which time half the bulbs have blown and no one can remember who owns the ladder tall enough to replace them.

Getting There, Getting Out

Guarromán sits exactly 29 km north of Jaén on the A-4. From Málaga airport it’s 170 km of mostly motorway: take the A-45 to Bailén, then head south for ten minutes. There is no train; buses from Jaén are school services that leave at dawn and return at dusk, so a hire car is essential. Accommodation is limited to one hostal above the steakhouse (seven rooms, €45 a night, Wi-Fi patchy) and a clutch of Airbnb flats aimed at engineers servicing the local bottling plants. Book only if you need to break a long drive; otherwise treat the place as a long lunch stop and push on to Córdoba or Granada the same day.

Leave before dusk in winter and you’ll see the olive groves turn bronze under the low sun, the metal roofs of the cooperatives glowing like hot plates. It is not dramatic scenery—no cliffs, no white villages perched on crags—but it is honest, workaday Andalucía, the part the motorways were built to serve rather than to show off. Fill your tank, drink your coffee, shake the leaf fragments off your shoes, and rejoin the A-4 knowing you have seen the province’s engine room rather than its postcard rack.