Dog Walkers in Málaga, Spain

Málaga has a weather phenomenon of its own that you need to know before planning a dog's week: the terral. It is a dry, hot wind that pours down from the interior, reverses the sea breeze and can lift the temperature ten degrees in a few hours, even in May or October. A terral day in the middle of August makes the mid-afternoon walk plainly inadvisable, and anyone working here checks for it in the forecast the way others check for rain.

Outside those episodes, the climate is among the most agreeable on the peninsula. Winters are genuinely mild — the temperature rarely drops below ten degrees — which stretches the long-walk season across practically the whole year. It is also why the city keeps an uninterrupted street life, and why dogs are such a visible part of the scenery in the coastal neighbourhoods.

The city stretches out along the sea, and that defines the routes. The East, with Pedregalejo and El Palo, has an almost unbroken seafront promenade and a fishing-quarter culture that makes walking on foot easy. To the west, Carretera de Cádiz and Huelin pack a great deal of population into blocks with little interior space. Teatinos, newer and wide-streeted, runs on a different and considerably more comfortable logic.

Above the city, the Gibralfaro hill and the pine woods around it provide the gradient and the shade the flat ground lacks. And at the western edge, in Guadalmar, lies the dog beach — one of the few stretches of the urban coastline where a dog can legally swim in high season. For many of this city's animals, that strip of sand is the difference between a bearable summer and one spent shut indoors.