The painted shelter of Barranc d'Alpadull sits in the folds of the Serra de Mariola, the limestone massif that rises between Bocairent, Alfafara and Agres in the inland corner where Valencia, Alicante and the old kingdom's hill country all meet. It is one of the many small overhangs in eastern Spain that carry Levantine rock art, the group of sites inscribed together by UNESCO as the Rock Art of the Mediterranean Basin. Do not expect a museum. These are faint, reddish figures under a lip of stone, usually fenced, often hard to read unless the light is low and raking, and part of the pleasure is simply knowing that hunters drew here thousands of years before anyone thought of building a road up this valley.
The road, when it comes, is good fun. Coming up from Ontinyent, the nearest proper town and the place to fill the tank, you climb out of the textile valley into pine and holm oak, and the bends tighten as the terrain folds. Traffic is light outside weekends, the tarmac mostly decent, and the air noticeably cooler than down on the coast. In high summer the morning is the time to ride, before the heat sits on the rock; in spring the whole Mariola smells of thyme, rosemary and lavender, which is no accident. The range has been a herb pharmacy for centuries, and the local liqueur, herbero, is still made from a long list of plants gathered on these slopes.
Bocairent, a few minutes away, deserves more than a glance. The old town stacks itself on a rocky spur above a ravine, with lanes too steep and narrow for anything but walking, a bullring carved out of the living rock, and on the cliff opposite the Covetes dels Moros, a honeycomb of man-made openings in the rock face whose original purpose is still argued over. Up in the mountains you will also pass the old snow wells, deep stone pits where winter snow was packed and sold as ice to the coastal towns in summer.
For a coffee and a sit-down, Bocairent's main square does the job, and Ontinyent has everything else: fuel, workshops, supermarkets, shade. If you ride on into the Mariola later in the day, keep an eye on the sky, because summer storms build quickly over these hills and the limestone gets greasy after the first drops.