If you want to understand what the ground cover is like in the hills behind Albocàsser, crouch down and smell it. Thyme is the loudest note, then rosemary, then something resinous from the juniper and the pines, with a dry mineral edge from the sun-baked limestone. In late April and May this country is a rock garden: rockrose with its crinkled white and pink flowers, yellow broom, wild lavender, tiny orchids in the shadier folds, and the grey-green sprawl of kermes oak, whose spiny leaves nobody enjoys brushing against. Abric IV at Mas d'en Salvador sits in the middle of all this, about five kilometres from the village, one in a numbered series of rock shelters that carry Levantine paintings of the kind UNESCO protects across eastern Spain.
The paintings themselves are modest, small red figures that have faded with time, and the people who made them knew this vegetation intimately. They gathered plants, hunted what ate them and followed the water. I find it helpful to think of the shelter less as a gallery than as a kitchen table, a dry, sunny place with a view in which a family could spend a day.
The ride suits that thought. Lanes lead out of Albocàsser between dry-stone walls, rising and dropping through small folds in the land, with surfaces that go from newly laid to cracked and gravelly within a kilometre. Bends are tight and often blind. Because the ground is open, you can see a long way, and if you stop and switch off the engine, you can hear sheep bells and, at dusk, the endless trill of crickets. Farm tracks branch off in every direction, and phone signal can fade, so a downloaded map is wise.
Catí and Les Coves de Vinromà are also small. Alcalà de Xivert, near the coast, is a town of more than six thousand and the dependable place to fill up. Wear long trousers for the walk if you can, because the scrub scratches, and in warm months keep an eye out for the odd snake sunning itself on the path.