By plane
The Alicante Airport (ALC), connected by many international airlines, is located 11 km (6.8 miles) south of the city.
Bus No C-6, departing every 45 minutes from Bus stop No 30, takes you to the city in about 30 minutes for €1. Ask the driver to notify you when to get off, for example the Train Station, Estacion de trenes. Bear in mind that this bus follows a circular route and takes about 40 minutes to get from Alicante back to the airport, the extra 10 minutes can make all the difference in missing your check-in time.
By train
Trains run by RENFE from Madrid, Sevilla and Barcelona daily go to Alicante Train Station, located in the city centre.
Get around
One of the best ways to go sight seeing and enjoying is by a car. The roads are good, and the town can be better explored with the freedom that a car brings. Many tourist rent a car for their holidays in Alicante. Often you can book the car with the flight booking before arrival. Many companies like Europcar also sit at the Airport.
By bus
The main bus station is located close to the harbour at Calle Portugal 17
By tram
Since 2003 Alicante has a new tram line connecting the harbour to the suburb El Campello, where tourists residing downtown might want to go to the beach. Further connection into Benidorm is currently being constructed.
See
Visit the Santa Barbara Castle (Castillo de Santa Barbara) for an amazing sight of the town and harbour. There is an elevator that starts near the beach (Playa del Postiguet).
Do
The sandy beach is popular during the day and fairly busy during the evening when it's illuminated by sodium street lights. These give the beach and breaking waves a surreal effect.
Avoid the far end by the sea-wall unless your a gay man out cruising, otherwise you shouldn't have any problems.
Buy
You can still buy commemorative plates of General Franco from some souvenir stalls!
Eat
Try a paella from one of the sea-front restaurants, they're less than €10. Some of the smaller restaurants in the side-streets will do a 3-course meal for about the same price.
Spanish food is rather carnivorous so if you're a vegetarian you'll have to stick with chips or just starve.
Drink
Keep a lookout for the Irish pubs - they're run by Spaniards who don't speak English but they serve draught beer which is hard to get anywhere else.
Sleep
The cheapest place to sleep is on the beach! The police don't seem to move people on and in the summer mini hippy colonies spring-up. This seems to typify the easy going attitude in Alicante.
Alicante (Spanish language) or Alacant (Valencian Catalan) is the capital of the province of Alicante and of the comarca of the Alacantí, in the southern part of the Land of Valencia, Spain, a historic Mediterranean port. The population of the city of Alicante proper was 322,431, estimated as of 2006, of the entire urban area, 434,505, ranking as the second-largest Valencian city. Population of the metropolitan area (including Elche and satellite towns) was 725,395 as of 2006 estimates, ranking as the eighth-largest metropolitan area of Spain.
Alicante is one of the fastest-growing cities in Spain. The local economy is based upon tourism in the beaches from Costa Blanca coast and particularly the second residence construction boom which started in the late '90s. On a much lesser scale, agricultural products such as almonds, citrus, olives and wine production, services and administration. The city exports cement, wine, olive oil, and fruit, and has light industries, including food-processing, leather, textiles, and pottery. Turrones (torrons in Valencian) —a honey and almond nougat—is a food speciality of Jijona, close to Alicante, although alicantinos are especially proud of their paella, being "arros a banda" a local favourite, and seafood. The construction boom has raised many environmental concerns and both the local autonomous government and city council are under scrutiny by the European Union. Wild construction is the subject of hot debates among politicians and citizens alike.
Luis Díaz Alperi (1945), of the Partido Popular (People's Party), has been reelected city mayor for his fourth term in the Municipal Elections of May 2007, followed closely by Etelvina Andreu (1969) of the Partido Socialista (PSOE).
The city has regular ferry services to the Balearic Islands and Algeria, and an international airport is nearby, served by Iberia and other airlines. The city is strongly fortified, with a spacious harbour. Amongst the most notable features of the city is its main castle, the "Castillo de Santa Barbara", which sits high above the city upon a cliff.
The most important festival, the Bonfires of Saint John, takes place during the summer solstice. This is followed a week later by seven nights of firework and pyrotechnic contests between companies on the urban beach Playa del Postiguet. Another well-known festival is Moros y Cristianos in Altozano or San Blas district. Overall, the city boasts an all year nightlife, helped by tourists, fun-loving residents and large student population of the Universitat d'Alacant. The nightlife social scene tends to shift to nearby Playa de San Juan (St. John´s Beach) during the summer months.
The city is the headquarters of the Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market and a sizeable population of Euro public workers live here.
At the foot of the main staircase of the City Hall Building (Ayuntamiento) is the "cota cero" (zero point), used as the point of reference for measuring the height above or below sea level of any point in Spain, due to the small tidal variations of the sea in Alicante.
History
Pre 20th century history
The area around Alicante has been inhabited for over 7000 years, with the first tribes of hunter gatherers moving down gradually from Central Europe between 5000 and 3000 BC. Some of the earliest settlements were made on the slopes of Mount Benacantil, where the Castillo de Santa Barbara stands today. By 1000 BC Greek and Phoenician traders had begun to visit the eastern coast of Spain, establishing small trading ports and introducing the native Iberian tribes to the alphabet, iron and the pottery wheel. By the sixth century BC, the rival armies of Carthage and Rome began to invade and fight for control of the Iberian Peninsula. The Carthaginian general Hamilcar Barca established the fortified settlement of Akra Leuka (Greek: , meaning "White Mountain" or "White Point"), where Alicante stands today.
Although the Carthaginians conquered much of the land around Alicante, they were in the end no match for the Romans, who established rule in the province for over 700 years. By the fifth century Rome was in decline, and Roman version of Alicante, known as Lucentum (Latin), was more or less under the control of the Visigothic warlord Teodmiro. Neither the Romans nor the Goths, however, put up much resistance to the Arab occupation of the area, which brought oranges, rice, palms and the gifts of Moorish art and architecture. The Moors ruled southern and eastern Spain until the 11th century reconquista (reconquest). Alicante was finally taken in 1246 by the Castellan king Alfonso X.
After centuries of war, Alicante enjoyed a siglo de oro (golden age) during the 15th century, rising to become a major Mediterranean trading station exporting rice, wine, olive oil, oranges and wool. But between 1609 and 1614 King Felipe III expelled thousands of moriscos who had remained in Valencia after the reconquista, due to their allegiance with Berber pirates who continually attack coastal cities and caused much harm to trade. This act cost the region dearly; with so many skilled artisans and agricultural labourers gone, the feudal nobility found itself sliding into bankruptcy. Things got worse when in the early 18th century Alicante, along with the rest of Valencia, backed Carlos in the War of Spanish Succession. Felipe won, and he punished the whole region by withdrawing the semi-autonomous status it had enjoyed since the time of the Reconquista. Alicante went into a long, slow decline, surviving through the 18th and 19th centuries by making shoes and agricultural products such as oranges and almonds, and its fisheries. The end of the 19th century witnessed a sharp recovery of the local economy with increasing international trade, which meant the growth of the city harbour increased exports of several products (particularly during World War I when Spain was a neutral country).
Modern history
By the end of the first quarter of the 20th century the whole of Spain was almost at the point of revolution. Amid growing civil unrest, after years of sponsoring a failed military dictatorship, the king Alfonso XIII abdicated the throne, and in 1931 a Spanish Republic was declared. A centre-left coalition of republicans and socialists narrowly won the subsequent elections, and lost the following one in 1933 to the conservatives and liberals, not accepting their defeat and initiating a revolution which was controlled by the Republican army after bloody struggle. In 1936, General Sanjurjo and General Mola led an uprising, supported by Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, to check what they claimed was the advance of communism in Spain. After three years of bloody civil war, Franco's armies (after the accidental death of both Mola and Sanjurjo) were victorious; Alicante was the very last city loyal to the legitimate government to be occupied by General Franco´s troops on April 1st, 1939, and its harbour saw the last Republican government officials flee the country. Even if not as famous as the bombing of Guernica by the German Luftwaffe, Alicante was the target of vicious air bombing during the three years of civil conflict, most remarkable the bombing by the Italian "Aviazione Leggionaria" of the Mercado de Abastos in May 25th, 1938 in which more than 300 civilians perished.
The next 20 years under Franco's police state were difficult for Alicante, with severe frosts in 1941 and 1946 adding to the problems of local orange farmers. When Franco died in 1975, his successor Juan Carlos I successfully oversaw the transition of Spain to a democratic constitutional monarchy. Regional governments were given more autonomy, and the cities of Valencia were permitted an autonomy they had not been allowed for four centuries.
Recent history
Alicante is the Valencia region's second-largest town. The port has been reinvigorated since the industrial decline the city suffered in the 1980s (with most mercantile traffic lost in favour of Valencia's harbour) and has spruced itself up. As a result, the city has attracted more day trippers. The airport at El Altet however beats by far its Valencian counterpart and ranks among the the busiest airports in Spain along with Madrid, Barcelona, Palma and Málaga and keeps expanding. It is connected with Madrid and Barcelona by frequent Iberia and Spanair flights, with many Western European cities through carriers such as Easyjet, Ryanair and Air Berlin, and has also flights to Algiers and Russia.
Other landmarks in recent history have been the opening of the European Union´s Office for the Harmonization in the Internal Market (OHIM) and the construction of the polemic "Ciudad de la Luz", a series of facilities meant to sponsor movie industries to set base at Alicante.
No recent history account can be complete without addressing two sociological phenomena of the past few years. Immigration has already been described in this article, and the second residence building industry has transformed the looks of the city, bringing both along a new set of problems, such as environmental concerns on one hand and fear of social problems once the construction industry boom comes to a halt.
Famous citizens
External links
