The castle had been watching us since we arrived. You can’t not see it — the rock face of Monte Benacantil rising straight out of the city, the walls of the Castillo de Santa Bárbara perched at the top, visible from every street and every bar and every stretch of the seafront. We spent our first evening looking up at it. By the second day we were going up.
We were travelling with friends this trip — Lisa and Andy, Sarah’s cousin and her partner — which changed the texture of the days. More stops. More sitting down at the right moment. Cocktails at lunchtime in a narrow street when the sun was directly overhead and the shade was the only sensible place to be. It suited Alicante.
The town hall floodlit blue at night. First evening. The scale of it takes a moment to register.
The first wander
The Apr 16 walk covered the harbour end of things — the marina in the morning light, the old town, the cathedral. A first pass. The kind of walk you do to get the layout of a place before you decide where to go back to.
Alicante’s marina at flat calm. The mast reflection absolutely still.
The Explanada de España runs along the seafront — a wide pedestrian boulevard of date palms over a famous wave-pattern marble floor in black, red and cream. In the morning it was quiet. By evening, when we walked back along it, there were portrait artists, a crowd watching someone play chess, the smell of something being grilled at the far end.
The Explanada at dusk. The mosaic floor has been here since 1867.
The old town sits in the shadow of the castle hill, its streets narrow enough that you walk in single file when someone comes the other way. The Concatedral de San Nicolás has one of the more extravagant baroque facades we’ve seen — columns and saints and carved foliage stacked up above the doorway as if someone was trying to fit the entire New Testament into stone.
The Concatedral de San Nicolás. The façade alone takes several minutes.
At some point in the afternoon we sat down for cocktails. Aperol, mojito, something pink. The street had giant decorative mushrooms planted along it. No explanation was offered, and none was needed.
Lisa, Sarah and Andy. The cocktails were called for. The mushrooms were simply there.
The street with the mushrooms. A perfectly normal afternoon in Alicante.
The climb
The next morning we walked up. The approach starts through the old town’s upper streets — quiet residential lanes, coloured facades, the occasional cat, the castle growing directly above you as you climb.
Sarah heading up through the old town. The castle visible at the end of the street.
The stone arches on the lower castle terraces. The rock the castle is built on cuts straight through the structure.
The path zigzags through terraces and gardens, each level revealing more. The city falls away below. Then the sea appears — and then both at once, and you stop.
The view opening up on the ascent. The city, the sierra, and the sea beginning to appear.
The top
The Castillo de Santa Bárbara dates in its current form from the sixteenth century, though there’s been something on this rock since the Moors held it in the ninth. Inside there are rooms with armour, old banners, a clock mechanism taken apart in a glass case, and a tapestry bearing the city’s three names across its history — Acra Leuka. Lucentum. Alicante. Greek, Roman, Spanish. The same hill, different people, different names, same view.
The city’s three names. The tapestry inside the castle. Acra Leuka. Lucentum. Alicante.
Two suits of armour in a vaulted room. Standing in the cool dark while the city bakes outside.
The views from the battlements are the kind that you photograph immediately and then put your phone away, because the photograph isn’t going to do it. The whole city below — the old town rooftops, the cathedral dome, the marina packed with yachts, a cruise ship the size of a tower block at the end of the port, the sierra pale in the haze beyond, and the Mediterranean flat and almost impossibly blue to the horizon.
From the highest point of the castle. The harbour, the beach, the marina, the cruise ship. The city below.
The cannon. Still pointing at the sea. Still not needed.
The Spanish flag on the upper battlement. A seagull on the lamp post.
The descent
Coming down is faster. The lower terraces have old stone archways and wild grasses growing from the rock and the sound of the city gradually coming back. We found the ficus trees on the rambla — massive, ancient, their aerial roots hanging down in curtains — and sat in the shade for a while.
The ficus on the Rambla de Méndez Núñez. Ancient, ringed in iron, entirely unbothered.
That evening, the last before we split from Lisa and Andy, we found a bar on the harbour. The sun went down behind the buildings. The marina lights came on. Someone brought menus.
Harbour sunset from the bar terrace. The boats, the palms, the end of the day.
The following morning — the day we moved on — I went for a run.
Alicante, Spain — 5.03 miles — 2:29:16 — 639ft — 12,606 steps