Jason Webster, author of Sacred Sierra, loves the quirky individuality of Spain, a quality he went in search of – and found - by buying a farm on Valencia’s ‘lucky’ mountain.

Spain has a magic to it that you either get or you don’t. For years I’ve explored my fascination for the country through a series of books looking at emblematic Spanish themes such as flamenco, the Moorish heritage and the Spanish Civil War, all the while trying to express something of the appeal of the place – something that gets under your skin and stays there.

It’s been sixteen years since I first came to live here, and the place continues to exert an extraordinary power over me, but it has changed in this time. When I first arrived, in the early 1990s, I was just in time to catch the tail end of the great party that broke out after Franco died and democracy had been established. The country felt like an enormous playground, and rule-breaking, after years of authoritarianism, was the norm. Going to bed before five in the morning was the reserve of the elderly or the infirm, while no self-respecting male walked down the street without a smouldering cigar in his mouth. And the booze was deliciously cheap.

That anarchic individualism appears to have taken a knock recently, however. The bars are closing earlier, prices are rising and there’s even been talk of doing away with bullfighting. But there are parts of the country where the old spirit lives on. And it was in search of this that a few years ago my wife and I ended up buying a mountain farm in Castellón Province, just north of Valencia.

Castellón has an unremarkable coastline and the kinds of cities you make a detour to avoid. But inland, away from the ceramic factories and orange groves, you quickly enter an unspoilt world of hilltop villages, sweeping pine and oak forests, crumbling monasteries and abandoned clusters of farmhouses. It was one of these – a mas, as they’re called in Valencian – which we now owned, at over 2,000 feet above sea level, complete with our very own little mountainside. The views were stunning, looking down a long green valley with a small white-washed Spanish village perched at the far end. The nearest neighbours were five miles away, and the only company we had was provided by the mountain goats that hopped around at dusk, or the wild boar creeping through the undergrowth at night. We were on the outer fringes of a larger mountain called Penyagolosa, the highest peak in the area, and a place we soon found to be famous for it legends and folk tales. The nearer to the peak you lived, they said, the luckier you were.

With help from friends and family, we did up one of our abandoned farmhouses and then turned our attention to the land. We had forty acres, most of which was sheer rock face and inaccessible, but some of which was made up of terraced fields that had been cut into the mountainside centuries before. There we discovered that we were the owners of around a hundred almond trees and about a dozen olive trees. The oil that we produced from these – pressed in a nearby village – was the best I had ever tasted.