Olvera, one of the White Towns of Andalusia, in southern Spain, has 99 bars, but the lager-lout culture is nowhere to be seen.
The olive groves stretch all the way to the foothills of the Grazalema mountains, with a few wisps of smoke rising from burn-offs of leaves and unwanted branches. Pigeons coo from their nests in the 200-year-old cathedral backing onto the 
house while black vultures cruise past high overhead. There isn’t a cloud in the sky and I’m ensconced with a glass of rioja on the Spanish equivalent of a deck (azotea in the lingo).
Even better, there isn’t a lager lout in sight.
It’s autumn 2008, and my partner, Margaret, and I have moved to Spain to live, for most of the year, anyway. We’ve chosen the village of Olvera in the fabled region of Andalusia. A pueblo blanco, Olvera is the genuine article – a white village about 1½ hours inland from the Costa del Sol, or Costa del Hell as the British tabloids describe some of the lager-lout-infested strips along the Spanish Med.
For a growing number of mainly British expats, the pueblos blancos are the places to be, because they are, well, still Spanish, with no high-rises to be seen, no Guinness on tap and no British department stores.
And because of Spain’s increasingly elaborate road and rail system, the villages are no longer hopelessly remote, accessible only by ramshackle buses, donkeys or Shanks’s pony. Olvera boasts a small hospital, a couple of hotels, a dozen restaurants, an equestrian school, a department store, a well-stocked library (we practised our Spanish by reading Elmer el Elefante and other children’s books) and, for heaven’s sake, even a supermercado.
We picked Olvera straight off the map, knowing little more than it was a place of around 9000 souls, it claimed to have 99 bars, which produces a promising ratio of one drinking place per 91 residents, and it was situated a safe distance from the dreaded costas. As a bonus it was about 1½ hours by car from ancient Jerez and Seville, with other smaller villages scattered about.
Our rented house turned out to be on the top of the village, clinging precariously to a precipitous hill towering over the countryside, alongside a restored 12th-century citadel. It became a lung-burning, thigh-strengthening, twice-daily exercise to get down to the town and back up while lugging bags of groceries and four-litre bottles of water. We’d often pass old people, huffing and puffing uncomplainingly up the precipitous steps. “Everybody loses three inches around the waist when they move here,” observed one (skinny) expat.
Olvera isn’t the poverty-stricken pueblo blanco so popular with penurious writers in the 30s. And the locals turned out to be totally unrecognisable from the suspicious peasants of so much 19th-century literature. Rather, they were warm, fun-loving and welcoming. And if you spoke good Spanish, they were highly impressed.
And here’s the problem. Elmer el Elefante didn’t quite cut it. Nor did the unabridged Oxford Spanish-English dictionary we lugged across from Britain. Unfortunately, Andalucian Spanish is not of the textbook variety but has a strongly Moorish influence. For instance, “how are you” comes out as a guttural como’da instead of cómo está, while the buenos días that you learn from the phrase books sounds like a threatening bo’dia.
Even Basque-born Jose, our English teacher, had trouble. “I’ve had to ask them to repeat things up to four times,” he said.
Like many a pueblo blanco, Olvera had a hard time in the Spanish Civil War that, as you’re often told, “divided father from son, brother from brother”. Under an unwritten code called el silencio, a kind of verbal truce, hardly anybody talks about the war now, but many of the old people attest to a terrible time. Stunted in build, they had childhood diets that consisted mainly of boiled grass. Some grew up hiding in caves or tents from the opposing armies.
This perhaps explains the paramountcy of family life. You often see three generations out walking on Sundays or dining together. And I’ve never seen better-behaved, more expressive children.
And it may also explain the inordinate pride the village women have in their homes. Every morning they’re out sweeping the porch, dusting the door, cleaning and polishing the windows – and that’s after they’ve given the interior a working over.
According to official statistics, Spanish women spend five hours a day on housework. During this sacrosanct period, older men are banished from the home. You find them every morning in the main square, sitting under the orange trees discussing the meaning of life.
The 99 cafes and bars made our descents into the village more than worthwhile, usually after a day’s writing. To get to know people quickly, we selected a handful of the best establishments and conscientiously patronised them. All family-owned, they included the Copacabana, Dolce Vita, Bocanegra, el Frenazo (the only trendy bar), el Jarrita, Mi Pueblo, Pepe Rayas, plus a selection at nearby villages like Algodonales, an old Roman cotton town that’s become a mecca for hang-gliders who leap off the cliff face just behind.
In Olvera, you can have any draught beer you like as long as it’s Cruzcampo. And it costs the same everywhere, exactly one euro for the rough equivalent of a half-pint. Even better, some bars gave you one beer free for every two consumed – and this after being served free tapas. Even better again, in one of those courteous gestures typical of the Spanish, somebody in the bar – usually a complete stranger – would buy you a fourth one just because he liked the cut of your jib. After those sessions we hardly noticed the walk back up the hill.
The Spanish are companionable drinkers who know their limits. In six months we never saw anybody even remotely drunk. “We’ll sometimes get a bit silly if we’ve been working on the olives,” Jose explained, “but it’s quite disgraceful to be seen drunk.”
Festivals marked the seasons. A highly theatrical people, the villagers prepared for months for Easter holy week – Semana Santa – when hand-picked young men would stagger up and down to the 200-year-old cathedral bearing massive effigies of the Virgin Mary on a throne.
School kids and their teachers, dressed up as Moorish kings and other religious figures, would march along the main roads, stopping the traffic. And in spring there are the chirigota shows, wickedly funny choruses about village luminaries that they’d been rehearsing for weeks.
The Spanish in general are natural singers, as fans of flamenco know, and the villagers are no different.
I cherish many memories of Olvera, but one moment in particular. We were in a bus on our way to a picnic when a woman behind us burst spontaneously into a folk song. Within seconds, the entire bus joined in, men and women in near-perfect harmony.
I didn’t understand the words, but you couldn’t miss the musicality, the sense of history, the pride in being Andalusian.