Olives, and then more olives. Riding west out of Jaén towards Torredonjimeno you cross one of the most single-minded agricultural landscapes in Europe, a rolling grid of grey-green trees running over every hill to the horizon, broken only by white farmhouses and the occasional oil mill. Somewhere among these low hills near Villardompardo, the Cueva del Encajero is a small rock shelter with traces of prehistoric painting, one of the many scattered sites that make up the World Heritage listing of rock art in Spain's Mediterranean basin.
Do not come expecting a show cave with lights and a gift shop. Sites like this are modest, often fenced and sometimes accessible only with a local guide, and the paintings themselves, schematic figures in reddish pigment, can be hard to make out. What they offer is a sense of how long people have been living on these ridges, long before the Romans planted the first olive groves here and long before the Moors and Christians fought over the castles that crown the towns.
The castles are worth a look. Torredonjimeno has the remains of one in its old centre, and Martos, a few kilometres south, sits beneath a dramatic rock with a fortress on top. Jaén itself is overlooked by the castle of Santa Catalina, now partly a parador, from where the view over the olive sea and the Sierra Sur is tremendous. The cathedral in Jaén, a Renaissance masterpiece by Andrés de Vandelvira, is one of the grandest in Andalusia.
As riding goes, the countryside here is a gentle roller-coaster of quiet, well-surfaced roads through the groves, easy to string together into a loop. Things get more interesting towards the south, where the Sierra Sur de Jaén offers steeper, twistier roads and real mountain scenery. Summer heat can be oppressive by late morning, and in the harvest months from November onwards, tractors and trailers loaded with olives are everywhere, sometimes dropping fruit and mud onto the tarmac.
Torredonjimeno, about five kilometres away, is a solid little town with fuel, bars and shops. Torre del Campo and Jaén are close too. In the bars, order a pipirrana, a Jaén salad of tomato, pepper, egg and tuna, and dip your bread in the new oil if it is harvest time: bright green, grassy and almost spicy.