Travel

September in Jaén: the rut starts in Cazorla, and the olives are still on the trees

Half the guides will tell you September is olive harvest in Jaén. It is not — picking starts in late October. What September actually brings is walkable mountains and the red deer rut.

By The Guide to Andalucía teamPublished 21 Aug 20262 min read

Peal de Becerro in Jaén province, white houses with olive groves on the hills behind

Jaén is the province of olive oil, and September is the month most travel writing gets wrong about it. The olive harvest does not happen in September. Picual picking starts in late October and runs into February. What is happening in September is that the mills are being cleaned and the crop is being assessed.

What September does bring is the two things Jaén is genuinely best at — the Renaissance towns and the mountains — becoming comfortable again.

What the weather actually does

Jaén city, at 580 metres, averages 27.7°C by day and 17.8°C at night in September, with 26mm of rain. The station sits on the town’s hillside, which keeps its nights milder than the surrounding olive plains; the valley floors around Úbeda and Baeza run hotter by day and cooler by night.

The mountains are where the altitude pays. The visited parts of the Sierras de Cazorla, Segura y Las Villas sit between 1,000 and 1,600 metres and run roughly 6–10°C cooler than the capital. By mid-month that turns Cazorla from too hot to walk in into the best hiking weeks of the year.

What is on in September 2026

  • 27 August – 1 September — Real Feria y Fiestas de San Agustín, Linares.
  • 8 September — Romería del Cristo de la Yedra, Baeza. A fixed traditional date.
  • Second and third Sundays — «Las Moniduras», Mancha Real. Sung processions with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century roots.
  • 29 September – 4 October — Feria de San Miguel, Úbeda, with the fairground and the bullring.

The province’s big set piece is later: the Feria de San Lucas runs 9–18 October and always ends on the 18th.

What life is like

Quiet, and getting cooler. The olive plains are waiting. Úbeda and Baeza — two UNESCO-listed Renaissance towns twenty minutes apart, and the reason to come to this province at all — are pleasant to walk again after a summer that makes them hard work.

The Sierras de Cazorla, Segura y Las Villas is the largest protected natural area in Spain. In September it stops being a place you drive through with the air conditioning on.

The one thing to do in September

The berrea — the red deer rut in Cazorla. It starts in the second half of September and is over by mid-October. The stags roar at dawn and dusk, and in the Cazorla valleys you hear it before you see anything.

It needs an early start and patience, and it is one of the few genuinely wild spectacles left in southern Spain. Guided dawn outings run from Cazorla town and the surrounding villages; going alone works too if you know where to sit.

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