Twenty-one Citroen Traction Avants rolled into Mijas Pueblo on Monday, September 28, and took over Plaza Virgen de la Peña like they owned it. And let's be real, a car that old has earned the right to park wherever it wants.

The gathering, covered by Euroweekly News, drew the classic French sedans to the whitewashed hillside village above the Costa del Sol, and I can't think of a better backdrop for them. Mijas Pueblo is all narrow lanes, blue-painted flower pots, and views down toward the Mediterranean. Twenty-one of those long, low hoods lined up in that square is the kind of scene that makes you stop mid-sentence.

If you don't know the Traction Avant, the short version is that it was a genuinely forward-thinking machine for its era, at least as the story goes among people who love old French cars, and it stayed in production for a long, long time, something like two decades if my memory of the timeline holds. I'm not going to lecture you on the full spec sheet here. What matters is that it was influential well beyond its years, and in my opinion a lot of the industry spent a long time catching up to what Citroen was doing with it. Take that as commentary from someone who loves these cars, not gospel.

It also has one of the great reputations in old-car culture. The police drove them, and so, famously, did French gangsters. Whether that's fully history or partly legend at this point, it's the story everyone tells, and it fits the car's split personality: dignified enough for a prefect, quick enough for a getaway.

I've never owned one, but I've ridden in a friend's 1952 over a stretch of washboard gravel, and the ride quality genuinely embarrassed the modern hatchback we'd brought along as a support vehicle. That part I can vouch for personally.

What I love about events like this one is the scale of it. Twenty-one cars is a real turnout for a model that hasn't been built in most of a lifetime. Somebody had to source each one, keep it running, and drive it up mountain roads to a village square, which takes a level of commitment you don't get from a showroom. It's the same kind you see at the local car meets I keep writing about, where the internet can't do what standing next to the actual machine does.

And these are machines worth standing next to. That long hood, the way the body sits low and sleek, the presence. Photos flatten it. In person it looks like it's moving even when it's parked.

The setting matters too. Spain's hill towns have a habit of adopting cars like this, and Mijas in late September is still warm enough that the owners probably had lunch outside afterward with the whole square humming to the sound of old engines cooling down. That's my guess anyway. I've eaten enough roadside meals next to hot engines to know how these days usually end.

If you're anywhere near Malaga province, keep an eye on the local classic car calendar, because these Costa del Sol gatherings pop up more often than you'd think. And if you've never seen a Traction Avant in person, find one. It's worth the detour.

Old things kept running well are the ones worth keeping around, and somebody in Andalusia clearly agrees with me twenty-one times over.