Alicante airport transfers and travel guide

Things to see in Alicante

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  Santa Bárbara Castle

  Mount Benacantil, city centre

  Santa Bárbara Castle stands on the 166-metre Mount Benacantil in the centre of Alicante, looking out over the whole bay. Its origins date to the 9th century, under Muslim rule. Castilian forces captured it on 4 December 1248, the feast of Saint Barbara, which gave the castle its name, and the kings of Aragon later rebuilt it. After long years of neglect it opened to the public in 1963; lifts inside the mountain carry visitors up, and the Museum of the City of Alicante (MUSA) fills five rooms within the walls.

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  Tabarca

  Island, 15 km south-south-east of Alicante

  Tabarca is the largest island in the Valencian Community and the smallest permanently inhabited islet in Spain — just 1,800 metres long and no more than 400 metres wide. In 1760 Charles III ordered it fortified and resettled with Genoese sailors rescued near Tabarka in Tunisia, and its gateways and the church of St Peter and St Paul, completed in 1779, still stand. The surrounding waters became Spain’s first marine reserve in 1986. Boats link the island with Alicante, Santa Pola and Torrevieja, more often in summer.

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  Palm Grove of Elche

  Elche, 10 km west of the airport

  The Palm Grove of Elche is a system of date-palm orchards within the city, laid out as walled rectangular plots and watered by irrigation channels built up since Roman and Islamic times. It is the largest palm grove in Europe, with some 70,000 date palms in 97 orchards inside Elche, and became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2000. Its best-known garden, the Huerto del Cura, is home to the Imperial Palm, a date palm with seven stems shaped like a candelabra, named after Empress Elisabeth, who visited in 1894.

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  Guadalest

  Mountains of the Marina Baixa

  El Castell de Guadalest is a small village in the mountains of the Marina Baixa, and its castle was built in the 11th century, under Muslim rule, to control the valley below. An earthquake partly destroyed the fortress in 1644, and in 1708, during the War of the Spanish Succession, a mine blew up its western side, so only a ruined portion still towers over the valley. Today the village lives mainly from tourism, with a Baroque church built between 1740 and 1753 and a string of small museums.

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  Peñón de Ifach

  Calpe

  The Peñón de Ifach is a massive limestone rock rising 332 metres out of the sea at Calpe, joined to the shore by an isthmus of rock debris. The Phoenicians called it the Northern Rock, to tell it apart from Gibraltar in the south. It has been a natural park since 1987 and, at 45 hectares, is the smallest in Spain, home to rare plants, more than 300 animal species and nesting sea birds. From the top, on a clear day, the view reaches across the sea to Ibiza.