Estepa

The scent hits you first—warm butter, toasted almonds and icing sugar drifting through the streets even before the autumn leaves have fallen. In Estepa, the Christmas biscuit season begins in August when the factories fire up their ovens and the whole town turns into a marzipan-scented bakery. It’s disorientating at first, like stepping into a living Fortnum & Mason display, but locals barely notice. They’ve been breathing in mantecado fumes since childhood.

Perched 604 metres above the olive-coated hills of Seville’s southern Sierra, Estepa commands a kingdom of silver-green trees that stretch to every horizon. The Romans came for the oil, the Moors fortified the summit, and today 12,000 residents still earn their living from the same two ingredients: olives and sugar. Drive in at dusk and you’ll see the town glowing like a sandstone ship, its medieval tower cutting the skyline while the plains below fade to gun-metal blue.

A Hill for Heat-Seekers

The climb starts gently on Calle Real, past 19th-century doorways painted the colour of bone and watermelon. Then the gradient bites. Cobbles turn to shallow stone steps, balconies cast black triangles of shade, and every junction offers a choice: push on towards the castle or duck into a bar for iced salmorejo. By the time you reach Plaza de España the temperature has dropped four degrees; in July that’s the difference between sweating and merely glowing. Winter visitors get the reverse benefit—up here the Levante wind scythes across the battlements, so even December afternoons feel Baltic. Bring a jacket; the locals do.

At the very top stands the Torre del Homenaje, all that remains of a 13th-century citadel. The stone staircase is mercifully short—52 steps—and the platform delivers a 40-kilometre panorama. Pick out the snowy streak of Sierra Nevada on clear days, or watch lightning fork across the Guadalquivir valley during spring storms. Entry is free and the gate stays open until sunset; arrive at 18:00 and you’ll have the view to yourself while the western olive groves turn liquid gold.

Churches, Biscuits and Closed Doors

Estepa keeps its treasures locked more often than not. Santa María la Mayor, built atop the old mosque, displays a flawless Mudéjar tower and a baroque retablo that would grace Seville’s cathedral, but the wooden doors are shut tight on Monday and Tuesday. The Carmen church opens only for mass—usually 20:00 weekdays, 11:00 Sunday. Plan accordingly, or content yourself with stone-carved cherubs spilling over doorways like frosted cake decorations.

Down in the confectionery quarter, things are more reliable. Mantecados San Roque (Avenida de Andalucía 15) runs tours hourly from September to March, €3 including a warm sample straight from the conveyor belt. The rhythm is hypnotic: dough rolled, cut, dusted, wrapped, boxed—12,000 biscuits an hour. Children stare open-mouthed; adults quietly calculate suitcase space. Outside these months you’re limited to the factory shop, but even then the staff hand out free polvorones, powdery discs that dissolve into almond-butter snow.

Thursday Picnics and Closed-for-Siesta Streets

Market day transforms the usually sleepy Hortelanos street into a shouting, nylon-canopied corridor. Stallholders from Córdoba arrive at dawn with goat cheese rolled in paprika, wicker baskets of picual olives and vacuum-packed jamón ends at half the UK price. Buy early; by 13:00 the traders are already packing away to beat the afternoon shutdown. Estepa still obeys the old siesta law: metal shutters drop at 14:30 and nothing—except the health-centre casualty ward—re-opens before 17:30. Miss lunch at 13:30 and you’ll be foraging for crisps in the lone 24-hour petrol station on the A-92.

When the town wakes up, evening life centres on Calle Mesones. Grandmothers claim pavement chairs, teenage boys weave between them on bikes, and waiters ferry tiny glasses of sweet Montilla-Moriles wine to tables that spill across the roadway. Order a tapa of migas—fried breadcrumbs laced with chorizo and grapes—at Bar Mañuel (number 42). It arrives sizzling, the cereal note closer to Christmas pudding than bread sauce, and costs €2.20 with a drink. Stay long enough and someone will produce a guitar; voices rise in saeta, the unaccompanied flamenco hymn that seeps from these hills like resin.

Olive Trails and Empty Paths

Estepa’s tourist office (hidden inside the town hall on Plaza de España) hands out a free leaflet titled Ruta de los Olivares. The recommended loop is 7 km, mostly flat farm tracks that leave from the old railway station—now a veterinary clinic—and circle through silver-grey seas of picual trees. Go in November and you’ll share the lanes with slow-moving tractors towing plastic crates of fruit; go in April and the only sound is nightingales and the click of pruning shears. There’s no café en route, so fill water bottles at the public fountain by the Carmelite convent; the spring comes straight from the Sierra aquifer and tastes faintly of limestone and mint.

Serious walkers can continue south to the Cerro de San Cristóbal, a limestone outcrop that adds another 250 m of ascent. The trail is unsigned but obvious: follow the ridge of white rocks past the abandoned quarry until the path narrows to a sheep track. From the summit Estepa shrinks to a biscuit-coloured dice throw, while the olive groves become an obsessive-compulsive chessboard all the way to Antequera. Allow three hours round trip, carry more water than you think necessary, and avoid July-August when the thermometer on the exposed rock tops 40 °C.

Getting Here, Getting Out

Public transport is thin. There are four buses a day from Seville’s Plaza de Armas (Mon-Fri, two on Saturday, none Sunday), journey time 1 hr 40 min, €9.35 each way. The timetable favours commuters over day-trippers: arrive at 11:00, leave at 17:30 or you’re staying the night. A smarter route is the medium-distance train to Pedrera (1 hr 15 from Santa Justa), then ring Jose Antonio’s taxi—+34 689 209 966—for the 15-minute hop, €15. He speaks no English but knows the Estepa bakery timetable by heart and will wait while you buy biscuits if you ask nicely.

Drivers should note that the A-92 coastal exit is currently being widened; expect 20-minute hold-ups between 09:00-11:00 westbound. Once in town, park on Avenida de la Constitución—free, unlimited—and walk uphill. The centre is a maze of one-way streets barely wider than a London black cab; your sat-nav will try to send you up staircases. Don’t obey it.

Worth It?

Estepa offers no flamenco tablaos, no rooftop pools, no souvenir fridge magnets. What it does give you is the smell of Christmas in autumn, a castle view you’ll share with eight other people, and the chance to watch an Andalusian town live by olives and sugar rather than tour operators. Come for half a day and you’ll tick a biscuit factory; stay overnight—Hotel Villa de Estepa, €55 B&B, perfectly comfortable—and you’ll hear the church bells compete with the hum of ovens at dawn. Bring a phrasebook, patience for siesta hours, and an empty suitcase compartment. The mantecados travel better than duty-free whisky, and customs never counts homemade polvorones as liquids.