Costur

The morning mist clings to Costur's hills at 465 metres, thinning gradually to reveal almond terraces that cascade down like stone-grey amphitheatres. This is not one of those Spanish villages that announces itself with cathedral bells and ceramic shopfronts. Instead, five hundred souls live scattered across slopes where the only reliable soundtrack is the clink of a farmer's tools and, in late winter, the low hum of mechanical olive harvesters.

Altitude and Attitude

Height changes everything here. While the Costa del Sol bakes at sea level, Costur's elevation knocks several degrees off the thermometer, meaning jumpers remain useful well into May and frost can still silver the windscreens in March. The air carries resinous hints of pine and wild rosemary, a reminder that you're closer to Iberian mountain hinterland than to the Mediterranean beaches most Brits associate with Valencia region.

That altitude also explains the silence. Sound travels differently when hills cup a settlement; conversations evaporate rather than echo. Walk the single main street at siesta time and you'll hear only your own footsteps and, occasionally, a dog staking territorial claims from behind a wrought-iron gate. It can feel unnerving if you're fresh from Benidorm, oddly comforting if urban noise has begun to grate.

Access reflects the topography. The CV-195 climbs 12 sinuous kilometres from the A-7 motorway, a drive that takes twenty-five minutes if you respect the advisory speeds, longer if you meet an articulated lorry squeezing past dry-stone walls. In July and August the tarmac softens; after October storms, rockfalls appear overnight. Winter visitors should pack snow chains—rarely needed, but when the white stuff arrives the village can be cut off for half a day until the grader trundles up from Lucena del Cid.

Stone, Clay and the Memory of Crops

Costur will never feature on a whirlwind art-history tour. The parish church of the Nativity squats at the top of a modest gradient, its bell tower more functional than baroque. Step inside and you find uneven paving, mismatched pews and a ceiling that owes more to twentieth-century concrete than to Gothic aspiration. Yet the building still anchors daily rhythms: the priest's amplified bell marks noon even for atheists, and September fiestas spill from the nave into the single plaza where elderly residents shuffle dominoes under plane trees.

Surrounding lanes retain the medieval grain: widths determined by two mules rather than a Fiat Panda, whitewash applied annually before the fiestas, balconies sized for airing bedding rather than posing geraniums. Number 12 on Carrer Major still displays a stone coat of arms—nobody can name the family—while the house opposite has patched its façade with brick after a 1930s chimney fire. These details accumulate into a living palimpsest more honest than any heritage brochure.

Outside the nucleus, the real architecture is agricultural. Terraces stitched together without cement hold almond roots in place; dry-stone huts, some no larger than a British garden shed, once stored hand tools and overnight fodder. Follow the signed footpath south-east and you reach Masía de Roig, abandoned since the 1970s yet with rafter beams sturdy enough to support a new roof should anyone brave the paperwork. The track continues, narrowing to a single-file goat path that eventually loops back past a threshing circle where wheat was trodden by mules well into the 1960s.

Walking Through Work, Not Wallpaper

Costur's trails do not deliver Instagram theatrics: no limestone arches, no turquoise lagoons. What they offer instead is a lesson in how semi-arid land has been coaxed into production for eight centuries. The PR-CV 382 way-markers guide walkers 9 km through olive groves to the tiny hamlet of La Puebla, dropping 250 m then climbing back. Allow three hours, carry more water than you think necessary, and expect dusty boots even in February.

Spring surprises first-timers. Between late January and early March the almonds erupt into blossom, turning grey slopes into a pointillist canvas of white and pale pink. Local farmers shrug—"blossom means frost risk"—but the spectacle draws painters from Castellón and the occasional BBC crew chasing climate-change metaphors. By May the colour has gone, replaced by the subtler drama of wild thyme, lavender and the improbably named 'tomillo negro' whose honey fetches 18 € a jar at Thursday's market in Lucena.

Summer hiking demands discipline. Start before eight, seek shade by eleven. The reward is auditory: nightingales along the Rambla de Cervera, the soft pop of pistachio seed pods in July heat, the distant throb of a tractor that has probably been in the same family since Franco's time. Autumn concentrates the senses differently; air sharpened by cold fronts carries the yeasty smell of crushed olives when the cooperative begins pressing in November. Stand outside the almazara at dusk and you can watch newly extracted oil—green, opaque, almost fluorescent—pouring into stainless-steel vats. They'll sell you a five-litre jug for 32 € if you ask before the bureaucrats close the office.

What Actually Ends Up on the Plate

British expectations of Spanish rural food often swing between two myths: truffle-laced haute cuisine or endless free tapas. Costur occupies the sensible middle. Ingredients dominate technique: extra-virgin oil from the village mill, almonds milled for turrón, game shot legally between October and January, vegetables watered by the occasional storm rather than industrial irrigation.

The only formal restaurant, Venta del Collao on the main drag, opens Friday to Sunday out of season, nightly in August. A three-course menú del día costs 14 € and might include gazpacho de almendras—chilled, thin, garlicky—followed by rabbit braised with bay and saffron. Vegetarians get * escalivada* (smoked aubergine and peppers) topped with crumbled local goat's cheese; vegans should state their case clearly—animal fat still underpins much of the flavouring.

Self-caterers should shop before Saturday lunchtime, when the solitary minimercado rolls down its shutters until Monday. Bread arrives frozen from a larger bakery; cured sausages hang above the counter alongside vacuum-packed longaniza that keeps for the drive back to Valencia airport. If you rent the village's only advertised cottage, El Recó de Costur, the owner leaves a litre of new oil and a packet of mistela biscuits—simple hospitality that feels more welcoming than a pillow chocolate.

Winter Fires and Summer Exodus

Honesty requires admitting the off-season downsides. January can feel claustrophobic: low cloud presses against the hills, wood-smoke seeps from every chimney, and the single bar reduces its hours when trade consists of three farmers and a retired teacher arguing over whose turn it is to buy the carta de ajedrez. Conversely, August swells the population to perhaps a thousand as grandchildren descend from Madrid. Suddenly the plaza hosts scooters, mobile phones, and impromptu karaoke that continues past the official 01:00 noise curfew. Neither extreme suits seekers of perpetual calm, yet both illustrate that Costur remains a working community rather than a gated museum.

Come anyway, especially in the shoulder months. Pack layers, download offline maps—mobile signal still falters in the barrancos—and abandon checklist tourism. The village will not entertain you in any manufactured sense, but it may recalibrate what you mean by "getting away". Somewhere between the scent of damp rosemary at dawn and the sight of an 82-year-old hauling shopping up a 15 % gradient, the idea of rushing anywhere begins to feel faintly ridiculous.