Encinas Reales

The Tractor at Dawn

By half past seven, the first tractor rattles past the church square, towing a trailer of olives that still glisten with dew. Nobody looks up. The bar owner sets out thimbles of black coffee and short glasses of warm milk, the old men shuffle their baraja cards, and the day's rhythm is fixed until the harvesters knock off at dusk. This is Encinas Reales, 445 m above sea level on the southern lip of Córdoba's Subbética hills, population roughly 2,200, where tourism is still a side-note to farming rather than the other way round.

The village name trips up most newcomers. Say En-thEE-nas Ray-al-ess and you will pass for a local; try translating it as "Royal Holm Oaks" and you will simply draw blank looks. What matters is that you arrive with euros already in your pocket – there is no cash machine here – and that you time your visit for spring or late autumn, when the light turns the olive groves copper-green and the thermometer stays in the low twenties.

A Walkable Triangle of White Walls

Encinas Reales has no single show-stopper, and that is precisely its appeal. The centre is a scruffy triangle of whitewashed houses, two grocery shops, three butchers and four bars that all serve the same Montilla-Moriles white wine, chilled until it tastes like a dry fino. Begin at the Baroque church of San Pedro, whose tower acts as the village compass, then let the alleys pull you southwards. Every so often a manor house from the seventeenth or eighteenth century interrupts the terrace: stone portal, iron grille, interior patio you can glimpse through the crack of a door. They appear without fanfare, mixed in with 1970s brick boxes and fresh render that still carries the builder's stamp.

Twenty minutes is enough to reach the last street lamp, where tarmac gives way to a gravel track and the smell of damp straw drifts across from a barn. Keep walking and you are in the olives. The groves stretch north towards the slate-coloured ridge of the Sierras Subbéticas, each tree spaced so regularly that the eye reads them as pattern rather than woodland. Farmers work to a lunar calendar here; if the moon is waning in November you will hear mechanical shakers humming through the night, headlights floating between the branches like low stars.

Oil, Gachas and the Tuesday Market

Tuesday is market day. Stalls assemble on the disused football pitch at 08:30 and fold by 13:00. Buy globe artichokes if it is February, or early peas in March, then queue with plastic bowls at the mobile fish van whose owner chips ice from a block stamped Cádiz. Back in the bars, lunch is a bowl of gachas – a thick cumin-scented porridge of flour, water and olive oil that sounds Spartan but tastes oddly comforting, especially when topped with crispy chorizo strips. Vegetarians can request the same dish dressed only with chopped mint and more oil; nobody raises an eyebrow.

The serious eating happens after dark. Restaurante El Palomar grills churrasco pork shoulder over holm-oak charcoal and will happily serve plain grilled chicken and chips to any child who recoils at paprika. Ask for albóndigas de bacalao if you want something gently Spanish: salt-cod meatballs in light tomato sauce, no chilli heat. Pudding is flores de leche, custard-filled pastries that even teenagers finish without prompting. A three-course meal with a bottle of local white costs about €22 a head; they do not take cards, so remember that missing cash machine.

Olives, Picnics and a River Pool

Encinas Reales works best as a pause between Córdoba (70 min drive) and the Málaga coast (55 min), but stay a night and you can stitch together a decent low-level walk. A signed lane heads west from the cemetery, dips through two dry-stream valleys, then climbs to the Ermita de los Remedios, a simple chapel that doubles as a lookout. The round trip is 7 km, almost entirely on concrete farm tracks; allow two hours with photo stops and another half hour for the bar to reopen when you get back.

For water rather than views, drive 7 km south to the hamlet of Vadofresno, where the River Cañamares slides over a limestone shelf into a chest-deep pool shaded by poplars. Local families arrive after siesta with folding tables and entire legs of jamón; visitors usually bring a baguette, tomatoes and a tin of tuna, assembling the simplest pan con tomate on the bonnet of the hire car. There is no charge, no lifeguard and no phone signal – bliss if you are trying to wean teenagers off TikTok.

When the Village Lets Its Hair Down

Fiesta time is loud. The August fair installs a neon-lit funfair on the main road and plays sevillanas until four in the morning; light sleepers should book Casa Rural La Casa de Maita, an interior-facing townhouse with a plunge pool, rather than one of the cheaper rooms above the bars. Semana Santa is quieter but equally intense: four brotherhoods squeeze their pasos through lanes barely three metres wide, the brass band echoing off walls so that drums seem to come from inside your chest. If you visit then, stand on Calle San Sebastián just after dusk; the procession pauses under a single street lamp, hooded penitents face the church door, and for thirty seconds the only sound is the creak of timber as the float settles on its bearers' shoulders.

The Practical Bit, Woven In

Buses from Málaga run twice daily except Sunday (none), depositing you beside the ayuntamiento at 13:45. Trains are faster but involve a 15 km taxi hop from Lucena, so most British visitors hire a car at the airport. Petrol is cheaper in Antequera; fill up before you turn off the A-45. Mobile coverage is patchy on UK networks; WhatsApp calls work from Casa Maita's dining room, where the Wi-Fi password is taped above the kettle and the host brings coffee unasked.

Bring walking shoes with ankle support; the farm tracks are littered with fist-sized stones shaken loose by harvest machinery. A light jacket is useful even in May – nights at 445 m can drop to 12 °C when the sun ducks behind the ridge. And pack a phrase book; English is thin on the ground, though the woman who runs the bakery will slow her Spanish to toddler speed if you attempt a sentence about pan integral.

Leaving Without the Gift-Shop Moment

There is no souvenir stall in Encinas Reales. The nearest thing to a memento is a half-litre tin of early-harvest picual oil, labelled simply Extracción en frío, sold from a cold room behind the cooperative on Calle Real. It costs €8 and will leak if you forget to tape the lid, but drizzle it over tomatoes back home and you will taste tractor dust, chapel bells and the soft metallic click of olives hitting plastic crates at dawn. That is the only brochure the village needs – and it comes without a single exclamation mark.