The late afternoon sun glints over the orange-leafed vineyards as my horse Victoria turns back towards the finca and I congratulate myself on my £40 flight from London. Just this morning, I was splashing around on a beach with barely a soul on it in a still balmy Mediterranean; tonight a Michelin-starred feast awaits in a restaurant it can be hard to snare a table at in summer. Welcome to Andalusia out of season, the best time to savour the charms of Malaga and its surrounds.
Malaga’s tourism has made headlines recently, but not the ones the city deserves. Not coverage of its remarkable transformation from grimy port in the 1990s to a city break star today, nor about the impressive pedestrianisation of much of the glorious Centro Historico. And there’s been little mention of the expanding Metro, which enhances the city’s traffic-reduction efforts. The headlines about a region where over 20 per cent of jobs are in tourism have instead screamed about “anti-tourism protests”. Or as Jorge, a waiter at Café Aranda, which has been serving Malaga’s best churros since 1932, puts it: “Some people are angry about the wrong type of tourism, bad behaviour and lack of housing for young people. It’s more ‘anti-mass tourism’ than against tourists, who are still very welcome”.
