By Matthew Felix
Spilling over the ranges near the coast, the sun sets the valley floor awash in gentle morning light. As though roused from slumber by a refreshing splash of cool water, the arid countryside comes alive with a thousand hues.
The silvery grays, rusty golds, and blood reds of the mountains change over the course of the day in ever-evolving concert with the sun. Behold the greens and yellows of vegetation, both in the geometric perfection of the olive, almond, and avocado orchards and in the random, paradoxical harmony of the pines, bushes, and grasses.
The blues of the sky and water upon the earth-toned palette are as immutable as the villages’ own impervious white, so deep and pure that the rest of the colors fade in the unsympathetic fury of the sun.
Bright stands of tall, white-barked poplars shoot up along the middle of the valley floor. Elsewhere, small, isolated oaks valiantly bear testimony to the ancient extent of a forest long forgotten.
Ahead, there is a curve in the road. Around it, the landscape is aflame with scarlet. Vast swaths of poppies rage like wildfire, seeming to perpetually outdo themselves in bursting into dazzling crimson. The flowers are so innumerable that, like rivers threatening to overflow their banks, stone walls keep them from spilling into the neighboring plots of olives and scrub, muted and drab in comparison, unfairly upstaged. Losing themselves in an ecstatic frenzy, the poppies open up to the sky, seizing their moment in the Andalusian sun.
