What's on in Málaga

The city's fair, run in two halves that barely overlap: the feria de día fills the streets of the old town from midday — sweet wine, flamenca dresses, street bands — and the feria de noche moves out to the Cortijo de Torres fairground with casetas, rides and concerts until dawn.

Planning: The daytime half is in the ordinary centre, so it is unavoidable if you are staying there, and rooms cost their annual peak. The night fair needs a bus or taxi out and back. Sleep is the scarce resource; pick which half you are doing.

Thrones rather than the smaller Sevillian pasos — some carried by more than two hundred men — through streets the city widens the route for. Two moments are the ones people come for: the Spanish Legion coming ashore and marching to the Cristo de la Buena Muerte on Holy Thursday, and the Jesús el Rico brotherhood freeing one prisoner on Holy Wednesday, a privilege the city has exercised for centuries.

Planning: Routes and closures are published a few days ahead and turn a ten-minute walk into an hour. The Legion's arrival draws a crowd that fills the port end of town by mid-morning.

Not a festival, but the calendar that decides what the coast eats: sardines are fattest in the months whose Spanish names have no R in them, and the beach fires along Pedregalejo and El Palo run at their best through those four.

Planning: Come outside it and the espetos are still there, but the sardines are not the ones people talk about. Fires are lit for lunch and again for dinner, not in between.

Nightly processions of hooded brotherhoods carrying immense floats, through the small hours. In Andalucía it is the defining week of the year rather than a church event people attend.

The night children get their presents, marked by a cavalcade throwing sweets to the crowd. Bigger than Christmas Day in most of Spain.

A religious procession through streets strewn with rosemary and decorated with awnings and altars.