Málaga, January. The Long Way Round. - The Anglo-Italian Runner

There was a half marathon on in Málaga that morning. We didn’t enter it. We just ran one anyway.

Thirteen miles, give or take. Started from the apartment before the city woke up properly, came home as the traffic was building. It was January but it didn’t feel like January — not the January we know. The light came in low and warm off the sea, the palms threw long shadows across the sand, and someone had apparently decided that an orange tree on every pavement was not too many orange trees.

Strava called it a second-best on one segment and a personal record on two others. The hills will do that.

First light on the beach west of the centre. The sun not quite there yet. A good time to start.

The Malagueña sign on the sand. It was the right time of day for it.

The climb

The route pushed west out of the city first, up into the residential hills behind the shoreline — away from the palm-lined promenades and into the part of Málaga that doesn’t appear on the postcards. Narrow streets winding upwards. White walls. Orange trees heavy with fruit that nobody was in a hurry to pick. A roundabout marking the edge of the San Telmo neighbourhood with a terracotta arcade in its centre, the hills rising behind it.

The streets up here are genuinely steep in places and the views earn themselves — down over the whole spread of the city, the Mediterranean filling the horizon, mountains cutting across the north. You don’t get that from sea level.

The San Telmo roundabout. The hills started properly just after this.

Running into the sun somewhere in the upper streets. It was that kind of morning.

The city spread out below, mountains holding the far edge. Earned view.

Orange everything

Málaga does oranges the way other cities do lamp posts. Street trees, garden trees, trees planted in the pavement outside apartment blocks with fruit scattered across the tiles below because there’s simply too much of it. In January the colour is extraordinary — all that orange against white walls and blue sky. You stop photographing them eventually. Then you find another one and photograph it anyway.

An orange tree doing its thing. January. Malaga. Of course.

Street-planted orange trees outside apartments in the upper residential streets. Fallen fruit on the pavement. Nobody collects it.

The walls

Coming back down and east, the route passed the Estadio La Rosaleda — Málaga CF’s ground, sitting alongside a dry riverbed. Two angles on it: first from across the scrubland, the graffiti wall along the riverbed reading FRENTE BOKERON 1986 ULTRAS MALAGA in letters big enough to read at pace. Then later, approaching from the main road with the traffic lights and the club crest lit up on the big screen above the entrance.

The graffiti along that riverbed is exceptional. Not tags — proper large-scale work. Three photorealistic portraits in pink and purple on black, faces looking out with complete confidence. Surreal figures on adjacent panels. A full gallery you run past and can’t stop to look at properly, which is its own kind of frustration.

La Rosaleda from across the dry riverbed. The ultras let you know they’re here.

The riverbed mural wall — three photorealistic portraits in pink and purple on black. One of the better things running takes you past.

La Rosaleda from the main road as the city came back to life.

Into the centre

The route came through the inner residential neighbourhoods — the bike lane between the palms on the long boulevard, the park with its café tables and winter-bare trees, the quiet side street with the narrow houses stacked up the hillside. The mural on the school wall along the colonnaded pavement said something optimistic in full cobalt blue.

Then the old town tightened things up and you were suddenly running on proper city streets with cafés opening and workers starting their morning and a lighthouse at the end of a harbour road that you hadn’t expected to be quite as grand as it turned out to be.

The bike lane through the palm boulevard heading east. Long straight run before the port.

School wall mural: “Florece Ternura de árbol, el aire acaricia un planeta herido que busca tu consciencia.” Bloom, tenderness of tree, the air caresses a wounded planet that seeks your awareness. Running past it too fast.

La Concepción — the botanical garden entrance, at the northern turn of the route. Too good to close the gate on.

The lighthouse at the harbour entrance. Emptiest road in Málaga at that hour.

The port

The far point of the run — the harbour, where a tall ship was docked in the January sunshine looking like it had arrived from a different century, which it more or less had. The BAP Unión, a Peruvian naval training vessel, a four-masted barque with signal flags strung across the rigging and the cathedral rising behind it on the hill. Nobody else around at that end of the pier. Just the ship, and the sound of the rigging, and the view back across the city.

We’d come a long way round to get here.

The BAP Unión in Málaga harbour — a Peruvian tall ship, flags dressed stem to stern, the cathedral behind. January morning, nobody on the pier.

Wide view from the harbour looking back — the tall ship framed against the city skyline and cathedral dome.

The way home

The return leg followed the seafront promenade west — the wide walkway lined with palms that runs parallel to the beach, the sea on the left, the city on the right. By now the sun was properly up and there were other runners, and dog walkers, and the beach hut at Playa de San Andrés had a meditating figure painted on the side of it which felt about right for eleven miles into a January morning.

The sculpture near the port — a dark abstracted figure, arched forward, set against palm trees and mountains — had been there on the way out too. It looked different on the way back. Things tend to.