Fines

The almond trees bloom for roughly ten days, usually mid-February, and the whole valley smells like marzipan. If you time it wrong you’ll still find Fines, 456 m above sea level on the northern lip of the Almanzora basin, but you’ll miss the only show that makes strangers pull over and take pictures. The rest of the year the 2,235 residents get on with irrigating olives, hauling stone and grumbling that the bar ran out of almond cake again.

A place that doesn’t rehearse for visitors

No coach parks, no multilingual menus, no souvenir ashtrays. The single cash machine vanished years ago; the nearest ATM is seven kilometres away in Cantoria, so fill your wallet before you leave the A-334. Mobile data gutters out on the final approach road, the ALP-824, a narrow rib of tarmac that snakes between polytunnels and almond terraces. Download offline maps while you still have signal or you’ll spend twenty minutes circling the cemetery convinced it’s the town centre.

What passes for the centre is a sloping plaza with a 1970s church dedicated to the Immaculate Conception and three benches occupied by men in flat caps who inspect every unfamiliar number plate. The church doors are usually open; inside, the air smells of candle wax and floor polish. There is no ticket desk, no audio guide, only a laminated card explaining that the gilded altar was rebuilt after the Civil War. Leave a euro in the box if you remember to bring coins.

Houses the colour of yesterday’s yoghurt

Whitewash here isn’t the postcard variety; it’s the practical kind that hides dust from the stone-cutting yards on the outskirts of town. Houses cling to the hillside like limpets, their back walls still showing the original ochre stone. Front doors open straight onto the street; on summer nights residents drag kitchen chairs outside and argue about tomato prices until the heat lifts. Walking is a matter of climbing short, uneven staircases that double as drainage channels when the ramblas fill. Wear shoes with grip – the council smooths the concrete every spring, but one cloudburst and the surface turns to skating rink.

Monday is dead day. The bakery shutters stay down, Bar la Sociedad closes at four, and the village feels like a film set waiting for extras who never arrive. Tuesday to Sunday you can get coffee and a toasted baguette for €1.80, served by a woman who will pretend not to understand your Spanish until you at least try. Order the pinchitos morunos – mild pork skewers that even timid British palates manage – and she might bring you a complimentary sliver of almond tart, brittle as shortbread.

Walking without way-markers

Proper maps don’t exist. The tourist office (open Tuesday mornings, Thursday afternoons, sometimes) will photocopy a hand-drawn sketch showing two loops. The shorter one drops into the Rambla de Fines, a dry riverbed paved with rounded pebbles the colour of elephant skin. After rain the water rises knee-high in minutes; if the sky looks pregnant, turn back. The longer loop climbs 250 m to an abandoned stone quarry, now colonised by kestrels and house martins. From the lip you can see the whole valley: plastic greenhouses glinting like dirty mirrors, the motorway a distant ribbon, and beyond it the Sierra de los Filabres bruised purple by altitude.

Spring brings the best hiking weather – 18 °C at noon, wild marjoram underfoot, enough breeze to keep the resident flies distracted. Summer is brutal: 38 °C by eleven, shade non-existent, the smell of hot pine resin so strong it tastes like cheap disinfectant. Start early or don’t start at all. Winter is crisp, often 12 °C in sunlight, but nights drop to 2 °C; the stone houses have no central heating, so rural cottages rely on wood-burners that smoke like damp bonfires.

Almonds, olives and the quarries that built Almería

Every February the valley’s 30,000 almond trees erupt into candy-floss blossom. Farmers welcome photographers as long as you stay on the tractor tracks; straying into the orchards risks a shouted lecture about irrigation pipes. Two weeks later the petals carpet the ground like confetti and the season is over. By August the nuts are drying in onion sacks outside farm gates, price chalked on a scrap of cardboard: €5 for a kilo, cheaper than supermarket own-brand.

Olives are quieter money. Picking starts in November when mist clings to the lower branches and the oil mills work through the night. If you rent a cottage, the owner will probably press a two-litre plastic bottle of last year’s harvest on you. It tastes grassy, slightly peppery, nothing like the mild blends on British shelves. Use it for dipping bread, not frying; the smoke point is lower than you expect.

Stone matters too. The local quarries supply cream-coloured marble flecked with fossils, the same stuff that paves Almería’s cathedral plaza. Lorries thunder past at dawn, un-silenced engines ricocheting off the gorge walls. Earplugs help if your bedroom faces the road.

When the village remembers to celebrate

Fiestas are scheduled for people who already live here, not for tourists who might turn up. The main burst happens around 8 December for the Immaculate Conception: a brass band, a procession, fairground rides that occupy the football pitch and block the only through-road. Parking becomes imaginative; if you arrive after six you’ll be directed onto a neighbour’s vegetable patch and expected to move the car before he needs to spray at dawn.

Mid-August belongs to San Lorenzo: late-night verbenas, grilled sardines, plastic cups of beer sloshed onto the dance floor. Temperatures still hover above 30 °C at midnight; the sensible locals nap from four till nine, then reappear in freshly ironed shirts. Visitors who attempt the timetable without siesta tend to wilt halfway through the fireworks.

Beds, petrol and other practicalities

There is nowhere to stay in Fines itself. The nearest British-reviewed accommodation is Casa Rural Los Palomares, a ten-minute drive towards Cantoria: two self-catering cottages with English-speaking owners who leave scones on arrival and won’t judge you for wanting tea at five o’clock. Tíjola, twenty minutes west, has Hotel Palacio de Doña Leonor, a converted manor with small pool and a bar that understands gin-and-tonic ratios.

Fill the hire car before you leave the A-7; the village petrol station closes on Saturday afternoon and doesn’t reopen until Monday. Sundays you’ll need to drive 18 km to Olula del Río for fuel, and the pumps accept Spanish cards only – no contactless, no Apple Pay, definitely no sterling.

Go for the quiet, not the checklist

Fines will never compete with the white villages that billow down hillsides nearer the coast. It offers no castle to storm, no gorge to parachute across, no artisan ice-cream in seventeen flavours. What it does offer is the chance to sit on a stone bench, listen to almond husks rustle in the breeze and realise the loudest sound is a goat sneezing three fields away. If that feels like time well wasted, come before the rest of Britain notices the map gap. If you need souvenir shops and a choice of restaurants, keep driving to the coast and leave the marzipan air to people who forgot to programme sat-nav.