Dog Walkers in Córdoba, Spain

Córdoba holds a record nobody here celebrates: it is where the highest temperatures on the peninsula have been measured. These are summers in which passing forty-five degrees is not news, and a July in which outdoor life is literally suspended between eleven in the morning and nine at night. Any care service that works in this city is built around that fact, not in spite of it.

The historic quarter, however, was designed precisely against the heat. The streets of the Judería and San Basilio are narrow, whitewashed and oriented to give shade, and the interior patios work as wells of cool air. Walking there mid-morning in June is surprisingly bearable compared with the wide avenues of Poniente or Levante, where the sun falls flat onto the asphalt.

The Guadalquivir provides the other axis. The Sotos de la Albolafia, beside the Roman Bridge, are a protected natural site in the middle of the city, and the riverside walk links the centre to the Parque de Miraflores along a flat, tree-lined strip that gathers a little river breeze late in the day — which, in the evenings of June and September, is worth more than any fountain.

To the north, climbing towards El Brillante and the sierra, everything changes. The ground gains height, the holm oaks appear and the temperature drops enough to make the trip worthwhile in the bad months. La Asomadilla, with its more than twenty hectares of reforested ground, is the largest park in Córdoba and the place people go when their dog needs to genuinely run without leaving the municipality.