Felix

The Thursday morning market spills across Felix’s single plaza with the urgency of a village that has six days to forget it exists. Canvas bags of almonds change hands for two euros, an elderly man weighs out olives on scales older than the republic, and the only queue forms at the travelling butcher’s van—its counter folded down to reveal morcilla stacked like chocolate bars. By noon the square will fall silent again, leaving only the clink of coffee cups in Bar Central and the echo of boots on concrete designed for donkeys, not hatchbacks.

Up on the ridge

Felix perches 800 metres above the Poniente Almeriense, high enough for the air to carry a pinch of thyme and the Mediterranean to look like a sheet of beaten tin. The road up from the A-7 twists through twelve kilometres of almond terraces; in February they flare white, by August the same branches stand charcoal against ochre earth. Park on the upper ring-road—Calle Castillo—where the tarmac widens. The lanes inside the village taper to shoulder-width, and Spanish grannies still sweep their doorsteps with the confidence of people who assume nothing larger than a mule will ever pass.

From the ruined castillo at the summit the view is a lesson in modern Spain. South-west, the plastic greenhouses of El Ejido glint like a calm inland sea; north-east, the Sierra Nevada keeps its snow long after London has forgotten winter. Between the two, the village tumbles down a ridge so narrow that some houses have front doors at roof level of the neighbour below. Whitewash is applied thickly here, but not uniformly—peeling patches reveal ochre stone and, in one case, an advert for a 1987 circus.

What passes for traffic

A single bus leaves Almería at 16:30 and returns at 19:00. Miss it and the options are foot, thumb, or the taxi driver in Cóbdar who refuses to climb the final gradient when it rains. Most visitors arrive at the airport 35 minutes away, collect a hire car and immediately get lost among the irrigation lanes that GPS still thinks are Roman footpaths. The upside is solitude: even in Easter week you will meet more goats than tour groups, and the only English spoken belongs to the retired Norwich couple who run the self-catering house behind the church.

Walking starts directly from the plaza. A signposted but unmaintained path drops into the Rambla de Felix, a dry canyon whose walls rise like sliced Christmas cake. After rain the gully becomes a torrent; the rest of the year it is a playground for stone curlews and the occasional booted eagle. Round trips can be stitched together using old mule tracks that once linked threshing floors—look for stone circles the diameter of a wagon wheel embedded in flat ridge tops. Spring brings the famous almond blossom route, yet the lesser-known autumn circuit through abandoned olive groves is quieter and scented with wild fennel.

Eating without theatrics

Felix has five restaurants, all on the same street, all shuttered by 22:00. Parritas occupies the corner where the road widens just enough for four tables outside; its grilled entrecôte arrives floppy with olive oil and costs €12 including chips. They will griddle a plain chicken breast for children who balk at migas—fried breadcrumbs tossed with chorizo and pancetta that Brits describe as “Christmas stuffing on a beach holiday”. House red comes in unlabelled bottles from a cooperative in the Sierra de Gádor; at €8 it costs less than the airport bus and tastes like blackberries left in the sun.

There is no cash machine. The nearest ATM lives outside the chemist in Cóbdar, 7 kilometres down a road that fog renders impassable two mornings a month. Bars accept cards reluctantly—signal drops with the same caprice as the weather—so stuff your pockets with coins at Almería airport and think of it as travelling back to the peseta.

When the sun drops

Evenings revolve around the plaza’s single streetlight. Old men play dominoes on upturned fertiliser crates; the women have migrated inside to watch a talent show whose volume compensates for the lack of contestants from Almería. Order a café solo at Bar Central and you receive a glass of tap water without asking—mountain etiquette assumes dehydration. Close the night at La Muralla, the only bar that stays open past midnight, where the landlord pours chupitos of home-made anis and tells anyone who understands that the castle stones were recycled to build the 1950s reservoir.

The reservoir, La Cinta, sits ten minutes below the village and serves as the local beach. Concrete steps descend to water the colour of strong tea; teenagers leap from the dam while their grandparents picnic under eucalyptus that smell of cough sweets. It is not picturesque, but on the Sunday after the August fiestas the entire population squeezes onto its banks for a paella cooked in a pan big enough to bathe a baby.

Honest seasons

April and May deliver twenty-four-degree days and slopes carpeted with poppies; the village fills with Spanish cyclists who climb the 400-metre elevation gain before breakfast and reward themselves with beer by 11 a.m. October brings the same temperatures but empties the skies—photographers arrive for star-scapes unspoiled by street lamps. Mid-summer is brutal: thermometers touch 38 °C and the mountain breeze feels like a hair-dryer. Accommodation lacking thick stone walls becomes an oven; even the dogs siesta until the reservoir calls at dusk. Winter surprises newcomers with frost on the almond branches and the occasional flurry that melts before noon. Snow closes the upper road roughly one day every three years, just long enough for children to build a snowman wearing a sombrero.

Leave with a paper bag of roasted almonds bought from the market stall—500 grams cost three euros and fit neatly into hand luggage. They taste of resin and wood-smoke, a flavour no amount of Mediterranean sea salt can replicate back home. Felix will not change your life, but it might recalibrate your sense of scale: a place where the loudest sound at 10 p.m. is the church bell counting the hour, and the horizon is close enough to walk to before lunch.