La Torre de les Maçanes

The bakery opens at seven, but the baker's been at work since five. Through the window of Forn de la Plaça, you can watch him slide coca de mollitas—thin pastry crowned with onion and tuna—onto wooden peels. By half past eight, the village's entire stock of morning gossip has been exchanged over 80-cent cups of coffee. This is La Torre de les Maçanes: 788 metres above the Costa Blanca, 25 kilometres from the nearest beach, and stubbornly uninterested in the rhythms of the Mediterranean below.

A Geography Lesson in Stone

Drive north from Alicante airport and the temperature gauge drops a degree every five minutes. The AP-7 coastal sprawl thins out, citrus terraces give way to pine, and suddenly the road starts to coil. Satellite navigation likes to pretend the village doesn't exist—type "La Torre de les Macanes" without the ç and you'll end up in a polígono industrial beside a discount sofa warehouse. Use the Valencian spelling or key in 38°27′N 0°28′W and the tarmac narrows to a single lane that tunnels straight into the 19th century.

Stone houses shoulder the street, their wooden doors painted the same ox-blood red as the soil. Rooflines sag under Roman tiles heavy with lichen. There is no sea view, no breeze salted with sunscreen. Instead, dry-stone walls terrace the slopes like contour lines on an OS map, each one hand-stacked to wrest a metre of onion patch from the mountain. Many are abandoned now—blackthorn growing through the barley—but the geometry remains, a reminder that every inch here was fought for and mortared with muscle.

Walking Through the Calendar

The village wakes twice. First at dawn, when tractors cough and the bakery chimney unfurls a ribbon of almond-scented smoke. Second at eleven, when the bar under the church bell-tower unlocks its shutters and someone brings out the dominoes. Between these two events, the place belongs to boots. Paths strike north-east into the Sierra d'Aitana, way-marked with faded yellow flashes that link into a 400-km lattice of shepherd tracks. One gentle circuit—signed simply "Pla de Petracos"—loops 5 km through abandoned charcoal platforms and takes ninety minutes, ideal if you've flown in on the early Ryanair and need to stretch jet-stiff legs.

Those after bigger mileage can keep climbing. The PR-V 147 punches straight up the ridge to the Coll de Rates, gaining 600 m in a shade under 8 km. From the top, the Med glints like polished tin, 40 km away as the griffon vulture flies. Come in March and the slopes smell of rosemary and bruised thyme; come in August and the air shimmers at 35 °C by eleven, so start early or risk heat-hobble. Winter walkers should pack a fleece: at this height, frost feathers the puddles even when Benidorm is still handing out beach towels.

What Passes for Lunch

There is no tasting menu, no chef interpreting grandmother's recipes through a foam gun. What you get is barn-door cooking designed for people who have been shifting hay bales since five. Mid-week set lunch at Bar Casa Alí—three courses, bread, half-bottle of house red—costs €12. Monday means cocido de pelotas, meat-ball stew thick enough to stand a spoon in. Thursday is arroz al horno, baked rice with pork rib and black pudding that stains the enamel dish purple. Vegetarians can request greixonera de bledes, a chard and potato gratin, but expect puzzled looks: vegetables are what food eats.

The bakery shuts at two and doesn't reopen. If you arrive later, your only carbohydrate lifeline is the village shop, a single-aisled cubbyhole that stocks tinned sardines, value-pack Colgate and, unexpectedly, local Moscatell grape juice in recycled Fanta bottles. Buy one: it's honey-sweet, alcohol-free, and travels better than the sticky dessert wine tourists usually lug home.

Saints, Fire and Tractor Blessings

Festivals here obey the agricultural ledger, not the tourist brochure. The main fiesta, Natividad de Nostra Senyora, lands on 8 September—just when the almond harvest is safely in and farmers can afford a hangover. For three days, the population quadruples. The plaza becomes an outdoor kitchen: cauldrons of paella large enough to bathe a toddler, grills loaded with butifarra sausages that spit fat onto the coals. Even the British second-home owners from Orba emerge, blinking, to drink cloudy mistela and attempt the muixeranga, a human-castle dance that ends inevitably in grazed knees and laughter.

January belongs to Sant Antoni. At dawn on the 17th, villagers drag pruned olive branches into a pyramid taller than a house. The bonfire is lit with a flare left over from the local fiesta's fireworks budget; by dusk, the core collapses into embers hot enough to roast foil-wrapped onions. Bring your dog—priest still sprinkles holy water on animals, a tradition that began when livestock was wealth and mule mortality could bankrupt a family.

The Honest Itinerary

Treat La Torre as a half-day detour, not a destination. The historic core is two streets and a square; you'll have seen it in forty minutes. The value lies in what surrounds: walking tracks empty even at Easter, birdlife that ranges from hoopoes to booted eagles, and temperatures ten degrees cooler than the coast. Come in late October and the hillside glows with spindle-berry orange; come in April and the air is loud with bee-eaters.

Rain matters here. A drizzle that wouldn't dent a beach holiday can shroud the ridge in cloud and turn footpaths into clay slides. If the weather closes in, cut losses and drop to Villajoyosa for hot chocolate and churros—25 minutes downhill, climate reversed.

Leave before the sun sinks. Street lighting is ornamental rather than functional, and the single bar shuts when the last domino falls. As you nose the car back towards the coast, the sea reappears—first as a suggestion, then a metallic stripe on the horizon. The temperature climbs, the pine scent fades, and La Torre retreats into its altitude, already reheating the ovens for tomorrow's 80-cent breakfast.