Jacarilla

The first thing that strikes you is the smell. Not sea-salt or diesel or sun-cream, but orange blossom—thick, almost cloying, drifting over the low irrigation channels on a warm March morning. Jacarilla sits 23 m above sea level in the middle of the Segura river’s flood plain, and every breeze drags scent from the surrounding groves straight into the village grid. It is tiny—barely two thousand people—and most travellers flash past on the CV-91 without realising the place has a name, let alone a palace.

That palace is the surprise. The Palacio de los Marqueses de Fontalba looks as if someone dropped a fragment of 1920s Madrid into a vegetable plot. Twin staircases, glazed galleries, a ballroom ceiling painted with cherubs that would not be out of place in a provincial French museum. The building is only open on Friday mornings (10:30–13:30, guardedly; check the handwritten notice the day before). When the gates are locked you can still wander the public gardens—palms, gravel paths, a bandstand—and work out why British motor-homers treat the adjacent car park as a free winter campsite. Fresh-water taps, shade, zero fees, and the coast twenty-five minutes away once you’ve threaded the lemon lorries on the AP-7.

A grid built for oranges, not tour buses

Jacarilla’s streets are laid out like graph paper, a legacy of the agricultural boom that followed the 1930s land drainage. Walk four blocks north of the palace and you hit citrus on all sides: navels in winter, Valencias late spring, thin-skinned Verna lemons that locals swear make the best gin garnish. The roads have no kerbs, just a shallow concrete gutter that carries irrigation water twice a week; step off the pavement and you will soak your trainers. It is the kind of detail the neighbouring beach resorts have paved over.

There is no medieval core, no castle on a hill. The Church of San Roque is pleasant, whitewashed, nineteenth-century with a bell tower you can climb if the caretaker is in a good mood. The plaza outside fills on Saturday evening when the single ice-cream kiosk unlocks its shutters; by ten o’clock grandparents occupy every bench while children career around the palm trunks. British visitors sometimes expect a tapas trail—Jacarilla offers one bar doing toasted sandwiches, another showing La Liga on a cracked TV, and Restaurante Vistabella on the edge of town. Vistabella has printed an English menu since 2008 and will tone down the garlic on request; the vegetable paella arrives the colour of saffron custard and tastes of the fields you have just walked through.

Flat paths, loud fiestas

The land is absurdly flat. Cyclists love it: you can pedal east to the salt lagoons of Torrevieja in an hour without changing gear, or west along the green-wedge path to Bigastro for a longer coffee stop. Walkers follow the irrigation lanes known as caceos; maps are unnecessary—keep the water channel on your left and you will loop back to the village within ninety minutes. Spring brings egrets, hoopoes, the occasional grass snake sunning itself on the concrete. Summer, frankly, is brutal: 40 °C by midday, cicadas screaming, shade only where a eucalyptus has been allowed to grow. August is fiesta week: daily mascletà (gunpowder barrage) at 14:00 sharp, loud enough to rattle motor-home windows. If you dislike fireworks, arrive earlier or later.

Winter is gentler. Daytime 18 °C, cold enough at night to justify the village’s one wood-burning pub, La Cueva, where lamb cutlets arrive sizzling on a hot stone. January is when the orange harvest peaks; farmers stack plastic crates along the lanes and the air smells like a breakfast bar. British visitors who base themselves here for a month often volunteer to pick in exchange for a few free kilos—ask at the Cooperativa Naranja on Calle San Roque, but bring gloves; the branches fight back.

When everything is closed

Sunday afternoon is a dead zone. The bakery shuts at 13:00, the supermarket rolls down its shutters, even the palace railings echo. Plan ahead: stock up on Saturday, or drive ten minutes to the 24-hour petrol station on the N-340. There is no train; the hourly bus from Orihuela does not run on Sundays either. Without a car you are stranded among the lemons, which is either idyllic or maddening depending on your mood.

The Wednesday street market is minuscule—ten stalls selling socks, melons, cheap bras. For the full Spanish market experience continue to Bigastro on Thursday or Orihuela on Saturday morning. Jacarilla’s real market day is agricultural: before dawn, wholesalers bid on pallets of oranges under floodlights at the edge of the village. Tourists rarely see it; you need to be awake by five.

Staying, or just passing through

Accommodation is limited to two rental flats above the bakery and a handful of British-owned villas on the outskirts. Most people visit for the day, picnic in the palace gardens, photograph the orange tunnels, then retreat to the coast. That works, yet the village repays staying until dusk when the irrigation water is shut off and the night smell of blossom drifts back in. Sit on the palace steps, listen to swifts slicing the sky, and you understand why repeat visitors from Norfolk or Yorkshire keep quiet about the place: it is ordinary, functional, alive—everything the coast once pretended to be.

Come in late March for blossom, late October for the last of the Valencias, or any weekday morning when the palace gates are open. Bring walking shoes that can handle mud, a shopping bag for fruit, and enough Spanish to pronounce the village name correctly: Ha-ka-REE-ya. Get that right in the bar and the owner will probably refuse payment for your cortado.