Alicante, ES

A legendary Alicante bar and restaurant since 1971, with a street-level tapas counter staffed by white-jacketed chefs slicing jamón and assembling fresh seafood pintxos in front of the crowd. The red prawn of Santa Pola (one of the finest in the Mediterranean) is the house signature, and the bar counter itself — praised by Joël Robuchon as the best in the world — is the experience to seek. The upstairs restaurant is good but the counter is the point.

Alicante's Michelin-starred restaurant by chef María José San Román, with a tasting menu that celebrates Alicante olive oil as a foundational ingredient — one of the few restaurants in the world that treats oil with the same seriousness that other kitchens give wine. The paella and rice dishes here are the most refined in the city and the menu shifts with each season and local harvest.

A port-side restaurant operating since 1961, with a terrace looking directly over the marina and a menu spanning over 100 varieties of rice — arròs a banda (the local rice cooked in fish broth), arròs negre (squid ink rice), caldero and fideuà. It is the most comprehensive rice-and-seafood house in the city and one of the oldest continuously operating restaurants on the Costa Blanca.

A restaurant on the hillside of the Parque de la Ereta below the Santa Bárbara castle, with a terrace overlooking the port and the Explanada and a menu of creative Alicante cooking with local ingredients and a daily-changing format. The setting is one of the best in the city — elevated above the promenade, the castle above and the sea beyond. Book specifically for sunset.

A buzzing tapas and wine bar in the heart of Alicante near the Explanada, with an extensive list of quality Spanish wines by the glass and elevated tapas — truffle preparations, Ibérico ham on bread with tomato, quality cheese from across Spain. The wine selection is more serious than a typical tapas bar, with a staff that can navigate it well. Good for an evening grazing session.

A wine and gastronomy shop with a standing tapas bar at the back, serving one of Alicante's most respected selections of conservas (tinned seafood from Galicia and the Cantabrian coast) alongside fresh seafood tapas and an extensive Alicante wine list. The format is wine shop first, restaurant second, which means the product quality in the glasses is consistently higher than a purely restaurant-focused operation.

A long-running Alicante restaurant known for traditional Valencian and Alicantino rice dishes and a broad seafood menu, with the arròs a banda and the dorada a la sal (sea bream baked in salt) as the house signatures. The restaurant maintains its local following from before the tourist-boom period and runs on the traditional format of sit-down lunch and dinner without the tapas-bar format.

A traditional bar near the Mercado Central that opens early and closes by early afternoon, serving cold beer and the city's most honest tapas — marinated anchovies, montaditos with fresh tomato and jamón, croquetas, simple shellfish. It is the morning-into-midday tapas experience that Alicante residents do before and after the market. Cheap, reliable and entirely unglamorous.

A long-established meat-focused restaurant north of the centre, known for grilled meats and Alicante's regional speciality of arroz con costra (rice baked with an egg crust on top, a specifically Orihuela-style preparation). The kitchen is traditional without ambition for innovation, which makes it the right choice when the seafood-and-rice format of the port restaurants needs a contrast.

A restaurant in Santa Pola (20km south of Alicante), the fishing town that supplies the red prawns to every serious restaurant in the city, with a terrace above the port and a menu that focuses on the day's prawn catch alongside local fish. Santa Pola is where the gamba roja originates and eating at the source in the fishing port is a different experience from the city restaurants.

A neighbourhood restaurant in the residential Plà district north of the centre, serving traditional Valencian home cooking — arròs al forn (oven-baked rice), cocido valenciano, stuffed vegetables and seasonal vegetable preparations from the local market garden (huerta). Away from the tourist zone and entirely local-facing, with a lunchtime crowd of regulars.

A wine bar representing the Pinoso wine-producing municipality 60km inland from Alicante, serving wines from the Alicante DO alongside mountain charcuterie from the Sierra de la Pila — longaniza, sobrasada and cured lamb — with a small tapas menu. The wines of Pinoso are among the most interesting in the Alicante appellation and rarely visible in the coastal restaurants.

A traditional tasca in the old town quarter near the Basilica de Santa María, serving the simplest and most honest Alicante bar food — cold soups, marinated fish, fresh anchovies with lemon, jamón and cheap wine. The bar has stayed the same through the gentrification of the surrounding neighbourhood and the regulars are long-term locals rather than tourists.

A small restaurant in the Santa Cruz barrio below the castle serving Alicantino seafood and rice dishes to a neighbourhood crowd that uses it as a weekly lunch spot. The fideuà (the noodle version of paella) is the kitchen's specialty and considered among the best versions in the city. Hard to find within the barrio's lanes, which keeps it primarily a local resource.

A venerable café-bar near the Explanada dating from the 1920s, serving coffee, horchata (tiger-nut milk) and local pastries in a slightly faded but characterful interior. Horchata is specifically Valencian and reaches Alicante from the origin in the Valencian community — drinking it here in the traditional setting with fartons (soft pastry sticks for dipping) is the local morning ritual.

A 3km circuit ascending from the Barrio de Santa Cruz through the old medina lanes to the Castillo de Santa Bárbara, circling the castle battlements at the summit and descending via the lift or the northern MARQ path. The route gives both the neighbourhood context and the summit view in a single 90-minute walk. Entirely within the city without requiring transport.

A flat paved coastal path extending both east and west from the Explanada de España along the Alicante waterfront, through the beach promenade of Playa del Postiguet and continuing past the marina toward Playa de San Juan. About 10km total from end to end, the route is the city's main daily walking and cycling artery with palm-tree shade for part of its length.

A protected 332-metre limestone monolith rising from the sea at Calpe 60km north of Alicante, with a summit trail that tunnels through the rock and emerges onto views of the Mediterranean that extend 100km on clear days. The Peñón Natural Park surrounding it has trails from easy shoreline walks to the full summit ascent. One of the most dramatic natural features on the Spanish Mediterranean coast.

A natural park in the mountains north of Alcoy (55km from Alicante) containing one of the southernmost holm oak forests in Spain, with a network of signed walking trails through cool woodland, spring wildlife and the best autumn colour on the Costa Blanca when the oaks and maples turn. The Santuario de la Font Roja at the park entrance is a 16th-century mountain monastery.

A snorkelling and coastal walking circuit around the perimeter of Tabarca island — a 2km walk around the entire island with multiple accessible points to enter the marine reserve water. The Posidonia seagrass beds and the coral-encrusted walls visible in the shallows are the reason the island holds marine reserve status. The best marine environment accessible from Alicante.

A converted railway path running 40km through the Segura river valley south of Alicante from Guardamar del Segura toward Murcia, through citrus orchards, date palm plantations and the surreal landscape of the Segura delta wetlands. The route is flat, traffic-free and rideable on hybrid or city bikes. The Guardamar pinewood dune section at the coast end is a natural monument.

Alicante's principal festival, held in the last week of June, in which enormous satirical papier-mâché sculptures are erected across the city's neighbourhoods and then ceremonially burned on the night of the 24th. The festival combines the most spectacular bonfires on the peninsula with fireworks, music, parades and the election of a festival queen. The burning of the sculptures (cremà) on the final night is an extraordinary spectacle.

An annual late April books and culture festival held outdoors in the Explanada and surrounding streets, with book stalls, readings, music and a midnight book market that brings out the city's literary community. A free cultural event that shows a different side of a city more associated with beach tourism.

The oldest contemporary art museum in Spain (founded 1976), holding the Eusebio Sempere collection including original works donated by the collector-artist himself alongside Miró, Picasso, Dalí, Calder and Chillida. The intimate scale and uncrowded rooms give it a different quality from a major national museum — time with the works rather than crowds around them.

A beach club on the long sandy Playa de San Juan north of the city, with a pool terrace, sunbeds, a restaurant serving fresh local seafood and a DJ programme that represents Alicante's more casual beach-club culture rather than Ibiza-style production. The 7km San Juan beach is the best urban beach in the Alicante area and the club format here is accessible rather than exclusive.

A turron (nougat) museum and factory visitor in the mountain town of Xixona, 30km inland from Alicante, where the soft Jijona turron style originated. The factory operates year-round and the museum visit includes a production tour showing how the almond and honey mixture is processed, aged and produced — with tasting at the end. The most specific food-production experience accessible from the city.

A seasonal summer evening programme at the Castillo de Santa Bárbara with projected historical narrative mapped onto the castle walls and battlements, creating an immersive atmospheric visit after dark when the fortress is lit from within. The standard castle visit is free during the day; this evening programme operates separately on selected summer nights.

One of the largest medieval fortresses on the Iberian Peninsula, rising 166 metres above the city on the bare rock of Mount Benacantil. The castle was constructed in phases from the 9th century through the 16th, with each building period visible in the architectural layers — Moorish foundations, medieval keep, Renaissance walls. Free to enter, with a lift from the Esplanada side or a long foot path from the north side, and 360-degree views over the city, the Costa Blanca and the sea.

The oldest neighbourhood in Alicante, a cascade of whitewashed houses with flower-pot walls and steep staircases climbing the rocky base of Mount Benacantil below the castle. Less famous than the equivalent Barrios in Andalusia, it is more genuinely residential and less curated, with local life persisting in the narrow lanes and a few neighbourhood bars visible on the way up to the castle. An atmospheric 20-minute walk.

An archaeological museum awarded Best European Museum that covers the region's history from Palaeolithic through Islamic periods with a strong emphasis on immersive recreation and digital technology to contextualise the artefacts. The Iberian settlement period holdings are among the best curated in the Valencian Community. The building design by the same firm that did the Guggenheim Bilbao extension won its own architectural award.

Alicante's famous promenade, a 500-metre palm-lined boulevard along the port waterfront paved with a mosaic of 6.5 million marble tiles in an undulating wave pattern. It is the city's meeting place and evening paseo destination, lined with outdoor café terraces and overlooked by the castle above. The wave mosaic is a minor engineering feat — 31 colours, perfectly level.

Spain's oldest contemporary art museum, housed in a 16th-century building in the old town, with a founding collection donated by Eusebio Sempere including works by Miró, Picasso, Dalí and Calder alongside Spanish modern art from the post-war generation. Free on certain days and rarely crowded, it is a significant collection in an easy walking location from the Explanada.

A tiny inhabited island 11 nautical miles from Alicante, the only fortified island in the western Mediterranean, with an 18th-century walled village, a marine reserve surrounding it and excellent clear water for snorkelling. Day trips by ferry from the Explanada take about 45 minutes and the island is small enough to walk completely in an hour. The sea around the island is one of the clearest accessible from the mainland coast.

A 1920s Modernista market building two blocks from the Explanada, with a tiled and ironwork interior holding the city's main covered food market. Fish, shellfish, seasonal fruit and vegetables, Alicante's distinctive turron (nougat) and Jijona almonds are all available from specialists here. The bar section inside serves coffee and a breakfast tapa to the morning market crowd.

Alicante's oldest church, a Gothic structure built in the 14th century over the site of the main Moorish mosque, with a Baroque façade added in the 18th century that is the best piece of Baroque architecture in the city. The interior retains the Gothic nave with three aisles, and the carved altar retablo is worth close attention. Free entry and in the old town barrio near MACA.