La Puebla de los Infantes

The thermometer on the pharmacy wall reads 6 °C at nine in the morning, yet by lunchtime you’ll be peeling off layers as the same January sun that warms Seville climbs over the olive terraces. La Puebla de los Infantes sits only 230 m above sea level, low enough to escape the bitter nights of Granada’s Alpujarras but high enough for the air to smell of damp holm oak and for the Sierra Morena to rise like a corrugated iron roof behind the last row of houses. It is the first place that feels properly “up” after the Guadalquivir plain, and locals treat the village as a winter base rather than a summer bolthole—an anomaly in a region where many white towns shutter up from October to Easter.

That year-round pulse explains the absence of souvenir overload. The single main street, Avenida de Andalucía, has a butcher that still sells morcilla by the quarter-kilo, a hardware shop smelling of rope and mouse bait, and a bakery whose owner will apologise if the gañotes (honey spirals) are more than four hours out of the oven. British visitors expecting a prettified hill town sometimes mutter that “it isn’t very picturesque.” They are right: the façades are whitewashed but the lanes are too wide for post-card symmetry, and the 1970s civic centre squats confidently among the eighteenth-century houses. What you get instead is a place that functions—tractors parked beside the church, children kicking footballs against Roman-reused stone— and that makes a useful, un-flashy stop for anyone who wants to walk in the Sierra Norte without surrendering to a hire-car boot full of supermarket supplies.

Morning in the dehesa

From the upper end of town a farm track climbs gently west towards the Cerro de la Horca, threading first through back gardens where chickens scratch, then through open dehesa: cork oak spaced thirty metres apart, their trunks charcoal-black to head height where the bark has been stripped. In March the ground is a lime-green carpet of wild oxalis; by late May it has bleached to the colour of a lion’s pelt. Signage is sporadic—an occasional paint splash or the word “sendero” sprayed on a rock—so download the 1:50,000 Andalucía-IDEA map before leaving the hotel. The going is rarely steep, but the altitude gain is just enough to let you look down onto red-tiled roofs and realise how completely the village is encircled by its own olive groves: some 1,200 ha of them, mostly picual trees that shimmer silver-grey when the wind flips their leaves.

Forty-five minutes up, a concrete trig pillar marks 520 m. From here you can see the A-432 snaking north towards Córdoba, but you can’t hear it; only a distant chainsaw and the clang of a bell on a wandering Charolais cow. The return loop drops through a shallow valley where an abandoned stone cortijo is slowly being dismantled by ivy and by locals who “borrow” beams for firewood. Allow two and a half hours door to door, including the inevitable stop to photograph boletus mushrooms the size of bread plates—don’t pick them unless you fancy a tutorial on Spanish A & E.

What lands on the table

Game cookery dominates menus from October until the end of February. A thick clay bowl of caldereta de ciervo (venison stew) arrives at El Rincón de Curro with three slices of bread already soaking up the sauce; the meat tastes of juniper and of the oak smoke used to cure the ham hock that started the stock. If the idea of faces staring back from a tureen of rabbit puts you off, order the tagarninas con habas—scrambled thistle and broad beans—which has the iron-rich flavour of spinach with the texture of baby asparagus. Vegetarians survive, but they need to ask: “¿Hay algo sin carne?” will usually produce a plate of patatas a lo pobre—soft potatoes stewed in olive oil that has enough body to make you realise the supermarket stuff at home is half-flavoured.

Prices are forgiving. A three-course menú del día costs €12–14 even in the smarter bar on Plaza de España, and house wine comes in a 250 ml glass caña because the village still drinks more beer than Rioja. Sunday lunchtime is the one moment everything closes; arrive after 15:00 and the only food on offer is crisps at the filling station on the ring road—plan accordingly.

Getting there, staying there

Seville airport to La Puebla is 83 km on fast A-road plus the final 17 km of camino comarcal. The last stretch, SE-6102, is single-track with passing bays; meet a combine harvester and you’ll be reversing 200 m through olive prunings. In July and August the tarmac softens and tyre noise sounds like tearing Velcro. Winter is quieter, but after heavy rain the same road carries a brown ribbon of runoff that can hide potholes deep enough to wreck an alloy. A small car is fine; a 4×4 only if you intend to drive the forest tracks beyond the village.

Accommodation is limited to three small guesthouses and a dozen rural rentals. Hostal El Carmen, opposite the eighteenth-century granary, has eight rooms with tiled floors and bathrooms the size of a Portsmouth bedsit; doubles are €55 year-round except 15–18 August when the feria doubles tariffs and insists on three-night minimums. English is patchy—bring a phrasebook or patience. The upside is noise: there isn’t any after midnight unless you count the church clock striking the half.

When to come, when to stay away

April and late October give you 22 °C days, wild flowers or autumn crocus, and hotel owners who haven’t yet been worn down by the annual cycle of fiestas. Between mid-June and early September the thermometer can nudge 40 °C; the village pools are for residents only, and the one shady walk (a 5 km riverside path to the ruined Moorish watchtower of Torrepalma) is alive with ticks. Conversely, January brings luminous skies but also the vendaval, a cold north-westerly that whistles through the gap in the sierra and makes sitting outside impossible even in a fleece.

If you coincides with the Romería de San Marcos (25 April) the main street fills with horseboxes, the smell of manure, and men in traje corto who insist on handing out plastic cups of fino at ten in the morning. It is good-natured, photogenic, and loud; light sleepers should book a room at the back.

Parting shot

La Puebla de los Infantes will not change your life. It offers no Moorish palace, no boutique hammam, no Instagram viewpoint crowded with influencers in straw hats. What it does give is an honest gauge of how an Andalusian hill village survives when tourism is a side hustle rather than the economy. Walk the dehesa in the cool of morning, eat venison that was shot last week, drink rough red wine that costs less than the London Tube fare to Heathrow, and you will have sampled the Sierra Norte in its work clothes. Just remember to fill the tank—and the cash wallet—before you leave the ring road.