San José is a tourist resort in the Cabo de Gata Natural Park and a geographical anchor for the novel’s coastal world. Its clearest connection is to Ingrid Bauer’s country house, where domestic and creative work occupy the same space; more broadly, the surrounding Almería coast is portrayed through the pressures of tourism, industry, and intensive agriculture.

Setting and connection to Ingrid Bauer

San José is identified as a tourist resort in the heart of the Cabo de Gata Natural Park. Ingrid Bauer’s country house, with stables, is described as near the resort. Its back room serves as a workroom for her redesigned garments, with three sewing machines, fabric, and finished clothes arranged alongside a bed. This combination makes the house both a place of business and a setting for Ingrid and Sofia Papastergiadis’s relationship. The resort itself is not given a detailed street-level portrait, so the narrative’s strongest association with San José comes through its proximity to Ingrid’s home.

The wider coastal environment

The novel sets San José within a region where the coast is not simply a leisure landscape. Elsewhere along the Almería shore, a beach opposite a cement factory is described alongside desalination infrastructure, unfinished hotels, and industrial storage. A Greek-flagged cargo ship appears offshore. These details establish a regional contrast between natural park and tourist development, while the text does not specify that this particular beach is in San José.

Agriculture also shapes the wider setting. The white plastic greenhouses spread across the Almería landscape, where the heat inside can become extreme and migrant workers pick produce for supermarkets under exploitative conditions. Later, a lorry carrying tomatoes grown under plastic passes through the narrative. These references connect the resort’s surroundings to an agricultural economy whose benefits and costs are unevenly distributed; they do not establish that the greenhouses or the lorry are located within San José itself.

Water, risk, and human intervention

The coast’s apparent suitability for swimming is repeatedly unsettled by warnings and contamination. At one beach, a café worker warns Sofia about jellyfish stings. In a later account relayed by Ingrid, sea police test the water at the local beach, identify a gasoline spill, and order swimmers out. The café operator disputes their measurements, drinks water to prove his point, becomes ill, and wants to sue. The episode sets personal confidence against official testing, but its precise location is not named as San José.

The novel therefore gives San José a clear but limited geographical role: it locates Ingrid’s country house within the natural park and helps orient a broader coastal narrative. The surrounding landscape is presented as both a place of attraction and a working environment, altered by tourism, infrastructure, intensive farming, and the risks affecting its waters.