Taste of Happiness

3 May 2026 · By Anna Drozdowska

The season nobody films

August is the month when the least is happening in the fields here. The vines are waiting. The olives are small and green and months away. The citrus is invisible. The rice is standing in water doing nothing anyone can see. It is hot enough that sensible work stops at noon.

The SeedsThe FireThe MakersThe Soil
The season nobody films
This coast has been photographed several million times, almost entirely in July and August.
Which is a strange choice, agriculturally speaking.
August is the month when the least is happening in the fields here. The vines are waiting. The olives are small and green and months away. The citrus is invisible. The rice is standing in water doing nothing anyone can see. It is hot enough that sensible work stops at noon.
The image of this region was built on the two months when the land is at its quietest. Our crew has spent a year in the other ten, and this is what is in them.

January and February

The almond blossom comes and it goes fast. A week or two and the whole interior turns white.
This is also citrus season. Vicente Todolí’s varieties do not ripen conveniently together, which is the point of having so many of them. Winter is when a citrus collection makes sense to a visitor, because there is fruit on the trees and you can taste the difference between things that all look like oranges.
It is also pruning. Olive, vine, everything woody. The least photogenic work in farming and the most decisive. What a tree does in October was settled by what somebody did to it in February.

March, April, May

The ground warms and the mountain flowers. Rosemary, thyme, the scrub species with no market value and no protection. For Eduardo this is the year beginning, and everything that flowers in those months ends up readable in the honey.
In the Pego marsh the fields are prepared and the rice goes in.

June, July, August

The two months everyone films, plus one. Mostly there is heat, and the work moves to early morning and late evening.

September

If I had to choose one month to bring somebody here, it would be this one. The grape harvest runs through it, and at Maserof the treading happens by candlelight across the whole month. Dénia holds its gastronomy festival at the end of it. The heat breaks and the light gets long.

October and November

The cacau del collaret comes out of the ground in La Granja de la Costera, and Ana Climent grows it, harvests it, dries it and roasts it herself over the weeks that follow.
Then the olives. Miguel Ángel’s dryland groves above Benifallim give a small crop, late, and it goes to the mill quickly, because oil made from fruit that has sat around is not the same oil.

December

Milling, bottling, and citrus beginning again. Pep Romany’s oak fire is doing its best work now, because the food that suits wood is winter food.

What the calendar is saying

Ten months of things happening, and we built the image of this place on the two with the least in them.
This is not an argument against summer. The land here works all year, most of the interesting work happens when the coast is empty, and a region defined by its beaches in August is describing about a sixth of itself.
Season One of Taste of Happiness is filmed across twelve months, mostly outside the summer. It is made by Anna Drozdowska (storyteller & strategist), Anna Sanocka (producer), Federico Grosso (cinematographer) and Anna Majewska (photographer).
Vicent Dominguís

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Vicent Dominguís

Rice farmer

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Eduardo Fernández

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Eduardo Fernández

Beekeeper & apitourism pioneer

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Vicente Todolí

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Vicente Todolí

Citrus biodiversity custodian

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Miguel Ángel García González

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Miguel Ángel García González

Olive oil maker

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Pep Romany

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Pep Romany

Chef-activist

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Carolina Pateman Ivars

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Carolina Pateman Ivars

Keeper of a living Roman winery

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Pepe Mendoza

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Pepe Mendoza

Winemaker

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Ana Climent

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Ana Climent

Heritage peanut seeds guardian

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