How Jávea works the rest of the year

The Montgó rises just over 750 metres between Jávea and Dénia, and most of the local weather follows from it. It stands across the north. Winter winds coming down the coast strike the far side and arrive weakened, which is why frost at sea level is unusual and why the bay stays milder than stretches of coast without that shelter.

The mountain also makes weather of its own. Cloud gathers on the summit before rain arrives, and anyone who has been here a few years reads it without thinking about it. On its flanks the mornings are cooler and slower to dry than the seafront three kilometres below. Which side of a ridge a house stands on decides how much winter sun it gets, and the difference is larger than people expect. Stand outside one in January rather than in June.

The massif became a natural park in 1987, so the line it draws against the sky is settled.

Three towns with one name

The old town sits inland at the foot of the mountain, about two kilometres from the water. It is built of tosca, the local stone, which weathers to a colour somewhere between honey and grey. Its church, San Bartolomé, was built to be defended: thick walls, few openings low down, a tower to shelter in when raiders came up from the sea. The market is on Thursday morning. The town hall is here too, and the ironmonger, the pharmacy queue and the bars that are still open in February. Much of the money behind the merchant houses came from raisins, dried under the arches of the riuraus that still stand in the fields, and it left when that trade did.

The port lies a couple of kilometres away, on the water between the old town and Cap de Sant Antoni. Boats still go out and the catch is still sold in the afternoon. A working quay on one side, a line of restaurants on the other. The port keeps its own fiestas, which are not the old town's.

The Arenal is the sandy beach further round the bay, and where most visitors stay. In August the strip behind it runs late and the traffic never really stops. By the end of October a fair number of those places have closed until spring. Above and between all of it are the hillside developments where much of the foreign population lives, green and quiet and impossible without a car. Each of them has its own winter.

November

The light goes at about half past five. Days are often in the high teens, nights are colder inland than on the front, and at the start of the month the sea is still warm enough for anyone who does not mind. Autumn is the wet season here, and the rain does not drizzle. It can arrive as a day's worth in an hour, the dry barrancos fill, a road closes for the afternoon. Then it is clear again.

What November shows is which parts of the town are actually inhabited. The Arenal is quiet enough to park anywhere. The old town carries on much as it did in June, because it was never running on visitors in the first place. Houses reveal themselves as well. A lot of the older stock was built for summer, with tiled floors, thin glazing and no insulation worth the name, and a house that is a pleasure in June can be cold and damp in January. Heating and dry walls matter more here than the temperature figures suggest.

The rest of what makes a place workable is dull and worth checking early. The hospital for this stretch of coast is in Dénia, a short drive north; Jávea has a health centre and an out-of-hours service. How you get into the Spanish system depends on whether you are working, retired or covered privately, and that is a conversation for a gestor rather than a paragraph in an article.

State schools teach in Spanish and Valencian, which matters a great deal for a child arriving at twelve and much less for one arriving at five. There are private schools in the area following the British curriculum. Whichever you choose, the school run will shape where you live more than any view does. Alicante and Valencia airports are each about an hour and a half by motorway, with Alicante carrying more of the northern European traffic in winter. There is no railway to Jávea; the nearest line is the narrow-gauge coastal one that ends at Dénia.

Why nothing here is tall

Benidorm is under an hour down the motorway and went in an entirely different direction. The coast here is rock and cove rather than a long flat beach, so there was never the run of sand that a wall of hotels needs. The land behind it was divided into small holdings left over from the raisin years, and assembling anything large was slow and expensive. What grew instead, from the sixties onwards, was individual houses on hillside plots, sold to northern Europeans one at a time.

Then the limits were drawn. The natural park, protection over the capes and the coastline, and municipal planning that has held heights down since. Seen from the water the town is roofs among pines, and nothing competes with the mountain behind it. That has a cost. Low and spread out means driving, and centres that only fill at certain hours of certain days.

Come in November if you can. Drive between the old town, the port and the Arenal twice in one day, once at nine in the morning and once after dark, and you will know something that August cannot tell you.