A small nugget of info. In U&F, the fictional town of Almacena is based on a real-life town called Olvera, in Cadiz, Andalucia. I was living there when I first got the idea for U&F, and the town became the main location for the story. I follow a couple of Facebook pages about the place, and today I saw that town has just appeared on a Spanish stamp celebrating rural tourism. In fact, it’s become the “Capital del Turismo Rural 2021”.
If you have a great memory for detail, maybe you can recall Underwood stashing a bag of clothes in the rocky seat of the castle? Well, you can see both rocky seat, and castle, in the pic (the building at the highest point). While fictional places like La Reina de Corazones and the restaurant Gerald referred to as “The Blazing Sausage” were loosely based on a bar and restaurant in the foreground area of the pic at at the bottom. In reality, there were no British pubs in the town, at least when I was there, I made that bit up based on the kind of places you find on the coast.
If you’d like a closer look at the place, here’s a recent YouTube video (07:41 length). It’s in Spanish, but you can always choose subtitles, or just look at the imagery: https://youtu.be/7h_PaDS1Zg4
Mike Bennett Author 