Alicante: Last One. On to Valencia. - The Anglo-Italian Runner

We’d been here three days. Long enough to feel like we knew the shape of the place — the rambla, the castle on the hill, the harbour walk, the bars by the marina where the evening light does something worth staying still for. Long enough to stop looking at a map.

So on the last morning, I went the other way.

The Rambla de Méndez Núñez, the spine of the city, before the day had started.

The other direction

Most cities have two faces. The one that shows itself — the postcard, the harbour, the old town — and the one you find when you take a left where everyone takes a right. Alicante’s tourist pull is the Explanada and the castle and the beach, all stacked together on the coast. I headed inland and west along the rambla, then out through the residential streets toward the river.

The gateway onto the rambla from the south. Stone pillars, ornamental lamps, morning quiet.

The route traced a long arc north and west before looping back along the Río Montnegre channel — or what passes for a river here, which is to say a broad, stone-walled canal of green-grey water that cuts through the city’s more prosaic quarters. No tourists. Just dog walkers, cyclists, and a street market in the process of opening.

Looking along the river channel toward the distant sierra. The mountains everywhere here — easy to forget until you look up.

The market

It was setting up when I passed — racks of clothes on scaffolding frames, trolleys, folding chairs, a woman with a walking stick navigating the gap between stalls. Entirely local. Not a destination, just a Thursday. The kind of scene a city produces without any intention of being photographed.

I slowed to a walk for a few minutes, partly because it was tight through the stalls, partly because I wanted to watch it for a moment.

The street market waking up. Thursday morning, residential Alicante. Nobody performing.

Back through the palms

The return leg came back along the Avenida de Salamanca — a long straight boulevard of date palms with the wave-patterned brick underfoot — and I understood why they’d laid it out the way they had. This is the city’s Sunday-morning route, the place where people come to be in it rather than move through it. Prams, dogs, a pair of elderly men walking slowly with their hands behind their backs.

At the southern end, the old RENFE station building faces the port — ornate façade, clock tower, Spanish and Valencian flags — and beyond it, the masts of the marina.

The old railway station facing the harbour. Flags up. Cranes in the background. The port always close.

The great palm boulevard on the return. Three or four people the whole length of it.

The butterfly

Somewhere along the Avenida de la Constitución there’s a large stone sculpture of a butterfly mounted on a plinth — face looking outward, wings spread wide. I’d passed it once already this trip and not quite stopped. This time I did. It’s by the sculptor Jaume Plensa, I think — or something in that vein. Monumental, slightly surreal, planted in the green median of a dual carriageway as if it landed there one morning and nobody moved it.

I took the photo and ran on.