Sunday 11 October, Carrer de la Reina, right as the sun went down. The sky over the rooftops had gone orange, then red, and the whole street underneath it had caught the colour.

It's a narrow street, cobbled, with balconies on both sides and terracotta tiles running along the edges of the roofs. Down near the crossing there's a cyclist and a few people walking, too far off to make out. And the street name sits right there in the frame: CARRER DE LA REINA, in Valencian, carrer rather than calle.

I've looked at this picture more times this week than I'd like to admit.

The street, not the postcard

I like it because it's the opposite of the postcard version of El Cabanyal. No beach, no boats. Just an ordinary street on a Sunday evening, somebody on a bike, and the light doing all the work.

This is where the days actually happen. The platja is a short walk away and it's lovely, but you don't spend most of your time on the sand. You spend it on streets like this one, nipping out for bread or carrying a bag of something home from the Mercat del Cabanyal. Once a day those streets change colour, if you happen to be looking.

Most of the time I'm not. I'm usually thinking about an invoice. Which is probably why a picture like this lands the way it does. It's a street you'd walk down without a second thought, caught at the one moment it asks you to stop.

Two languages on one sign

The name made me smile too. Round here you get used to living in two languages at once, sometimes on the same sign. Our own address, Calle del Riu Jalón, manages to be half Spanish and half Valencian before it even reaches the number. Nobody local finds that strange, and after a while neither do you.

For anyone new to the barrio, it's one of the small things that tells you where you are. You'll hear both, often in the same conversation, and the street signs simply write it down.

When to look up

If there's a tip in this, it's a small one. In autumn the sun sets early enough that you can catch it on the walk home rather than from the sofa. Don't look for it at the end of the street. Look up. The colour is over the roofline, above the balconies and the tiles, and on a narrow street it fills the whole strip of sky between them.

You don't need a terraza with a view for it. You need to be outside at the right few minutes and to glance up instead of at your phone (which, I realise, is advice I mostly give to myself).

The balconies will still be there tomorrow. The sky only does that for a moment.