Oria

The road that keeps going up

The ALP-822 turns inland at Albox, climbs through almond terraces, then simply refuses to flatten out. By the time the car heater stops struggling, the digital altimeter reads 1,025 m and the white houses of Oria appear, stacked like sugar cubes on a ridge. Alicante baggage carousels feel a world away; in reality it’s ninety minutes from touchdown to the village fountain, assuming you didn’t stop for the emergency bottle of milk in Albox. You’ll need it—Oria’s two grocers roll down their shutters at 14:00 sharp and reopen only when the heat has been beaten out of the afternoon.

At this height the air thins and the Costa de Almería’s hair-dryer breeze turns into something you can actually breathe. Nights drop ten degrees below the coast, so that fleece you packed “just in case” becomes uniform. The compensation is the view: south across the Almanzora valley, north to the sharper peaks of the Sierra de las Estancias, both lit amber by a sun that seems to hover longer because the horizon has dropped away.

Houses that face the weather

Oria’s builders understood the slope. Streets are cut into the hill like contour lines; every front door is a basement somewhere else. The stone is soft limestone, easy to carve, easier to patch, which explains the crochet of repairs—fresh white rectangles stitched onto 150-year-old walls. Look up and you’ll see functional elements that tourism brochures call “quirky”: roof traps for collecting snowmelt, outdoor bread ovens converted into tool sheds, iron rings where mules were once tethered beside what is now someone’s Airbnb.

There is no prescribed “old town” route. The best map is the church tower of Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes; keep it in sight and you won’t end up in somebody’s vegetable patch. The building itself is an architectural palimpsest: Renaissance portal, eighteenth-century barrel vault, twentieth-century electrical conduit tacked on like an afterthought. Mass bells still dictate the day’s rhythm; when they ring at 20:00, the handful of bars switch off the television—village etiquette older than the remote control.

Walking without a postcard

The countryside starts where the tarmac ends. A web of farmer tracks strikes out into almond and olive groves; waymarking is sporadic but confidence is easily gained—every track eventually hits either a cortijo or the main road, so getting irretrievably lost is almost impossible. One gentle circuit (about 5 km) drops from the cemetery to the abandoned hamlet of El Murtas, then climbs back via an old threshing floor with 360-degree sierra views. Spring brings pink thrift among the rocks; after rain the scent of fennel drifts across the path like liquorice.

Serious walkers can aim for the ruined castle above the village, though “castle” flatters a single tower stump and perimeter walls that double as a goat shelter. Still, the effort-to-view ratio is unbeatable: the Mediterranean glints silver 40 km away while the valley’s plastic-greenhouse belt resembles a frozen tsunami of polytunnels. Take water; there is none on the hill, and summer sun at this altitude burns faster than most British skin is prepared for.

What arrives on the plate

Menus are short, seasonal and obstinately local. Winter means thick garlic soup and migas—fried breadcrumbs shot through with chorizo and enough olive oil to silence any cardiologist within a fifty-mile radius. Spring brings remojón, a salad of salt-cod, orange and spring onion that tastes like Spain trying to explain the concept of marmalade to a fish. Portions are built for people who have walked behind a plough all morning; doggie bags are unheard of, so consider sharing unless you’re aiming for siesta immobility.

The nearest proper restaurant is in an old olive press on the road out to Chirivel. They serve chuletas de cordero the size of paperback books and open only at weekends; book or you’ll be driving back to Albox for a kebab. In the village itself the culinary scene amounts to two bars and a bakery whose almond biscuits (mantecados) crumble into powder the moment they sense a British accent—eat over the plate or wear the evidence.

When fiesta overrides bedtime

Oria’s calendar is mercifully free of tourist-heavy pageants. September’s Feria de Mercedes is the big one: three days of processions, brass bands that rehearse all night, and a travelling funfair squeezed into a plaza barely large enough for a game of cricket. Visitors are welcome but not announced; buy a plastic cup of beer, stand in the shadow of the church, and someone’s grandmother will explain which effigy is being paraded and why the Town Hall has draped itself in bunting made from 1980s election posters.

August’s night-time verbena is more manageable: one outdoor disco, one bar selling mojitos from a cool box, children still chasing each other at 01:00 while their parents pretend tomorrow isn’t a workday. Even if you value sleep, resist the urge to complain; volume is measured by village standards, not Home Counties ones. Bring ear-plugs or join in—middle-aged Britons attempting the sevillanas are regarded as entertainment for everyone else.

The practical mountain maths

Oria suits a two-night minimum. One night evaporates in travel and altitude adjustment; by the second you’ll have worked out which bar serves coffee without asking if you want “café con leche or Americano?” After that the sierra tempts further: day trips to the marble quarries of Macael, the cave paintings of Los Chaparros, or the Saturday market in Albox where Dutch expats flog second-hand paperbacks and overpriced cheddar.

Car hire is non-negotiable. The village bus—a single morning service to Almería—exists mainly to prove public transport theory rather than to move people. Fill the tank at the coast; mountain petrol stations close on Sundays and fiesta days, sometimes both. Mobile coverage is patchy; download offline maps before leaving the airport and expect GPS to drift when the road narrows to a goat track. Finally, pack insect repellent. Sierra gnats operate outside normal EU working hours and regard DEET as a condiment.

Leave on a weekday before the market stalls block the main street and you’ll drop back to sea level in forty minutes. The heat will hit like a hair-dryer on full, the coast’s four-lane ring-road will roar, and Oria will already feel slightly unreal—an white notch on a ridge where the bells still tell time and the night sky still outnumbers light pollution by several billion to one.