None of this exists without Pepica.

A girl from the town

Pepica was born in l'Alfàs del Pi and lived in the town itself. Not the coast people picture now — no Albir promenade, no international community, no Benidorm skyline ten minutes down the road. A small agricultural village founded by families who had come down from Polop to settle difficult land near the sea, and who lived on what the terraces gave them.

She lost her mother when she was six. She lost her father when she was eleven. Whatever childhood she had ended somewhere in those five years, and what replaced it was work.

The move to Foia Blanca

Later the whole family moved out of the town and up to La Foia Blanca. Away from neighbours, away from the square, onto a hillside that came in a slope and full of stone.

Land like this does not arrive usable. Someone has to make it flat first. That is what the terraces are — not a feature of the ground but generations of work on it: dry stone walls, no mortar, every stone wedged against the next by weight and judgement until the wall holds itself up. Two hundred years if it is done right. Until the first storm if it is not.

The only woman among six

She worked this land as the only woman here, and looked after five men on her own at the same time.

That means two full jobs at once, and only one of them was ever called work. Out on the terraces: pruning, grafting, carrying water, taking the harvest in, knowing by eye whether the medlars needed another week. And back at the house: feeding six people, keeping the place standing, mending what anyone else would have thrown away — not out of poverty of spirit, but because throwing away something still useful struck her as disrespectful.

She lived through the years when there was real hunger here. The long postwar, rationed bread, ground carob when there was nothing else. And she came out the other side doing exactly the same thing she had done going in: work, save, share out.

What got built

Nothing here was built in one go. It was built a poc a poc — when there was money and when there were hands. First the caseta: four walls, a cane-and-tile roof, a floor, a door placed so the winter sun came in and the August sun did not. Then the porch, because in this climate shade is another room. Then the corral, the oven, the water tank, the shed.

Five structures that are not five projects. They are one project that took fifty years.

And all of it built with a climate intelligence we now pay consultants to rediscover — thick walls that hold back the heat half a day, small windows south and large ones north, a paved patio that cools by evaporation, a deciduous tree by the facade giving shade in summer and sun in winter, free, every year. Nobody taught her that in a school. She knew it because people who did not know it did not last up here.

When the coast arrived

Then, inside a single generation, everything changed. The sixties and seventies came, Benidorm came, the first foreign residents arrived in the Albir, and land stopped being worth what it produced and started being worth what could be built on it.

It was a silent earthquake. Families who had measured their wealth in fanecades and harvests for two centuries discovered a terrace was worth more empty than full. Many sold — often rightly, because the fields were giving hunger and the coast was giving wages. L'Alfàs went from a farming village to one of the most international municipalities in Spain. Almond trees went unpruned. Walls came down. The riuraus where muscat was dried into raisins became storerooms, or disappeared.

The decision not to sell

This farm did not sell.

Seen from here, that is the most important decision anyone in this family ever made. It was not an investment strategy. It was stubbornness, attachment, and probably a serious argument in a kitchen.

But it is the reason there is anything to write about. Two parcels with the terraces still standing, fruit trees still alive, water, five structures, and a view that can no longer be bought anywhere on this coast at any price.