Altea and Elche day trips

We stayed 9 days in Alicante, Spain and we anticipated doing a lot of day trips along the coast. Alicante has a light rail (tram) that goes a long ways North and hits several different beach towns. On our first day in town, we walked a few miles along the beach to Playa de Albufereta and were able to take the train home. While this beach wasn’t too exciting in the offseason, we were still excited to visit several of the other locations further North that were on the tram route- El Campello, Benidorm, Altea, Calpe and Denia.

Altea

The next day we set off for our first day trip- Altea. It was almost 2 hours on a crowded tram- not a good start. The beach was rocky without much sand it was empty of people. This could because it is November but it could be because there are much prettier beaches along this coast. The Malecon (paved walkway) was just what we expected. Lots of touristy shops and restaurants similar to what we have seen in many other European towns. It was fun to walk the beach boardwalk but the real draw for this town was the hillside. We climbed the small alleys to get to the church at the top of the hill. All of the buildings were painted white and the narrow streets with lots of boutiques reminded us of Santorini, Greece. We had a so-so lunch on the way up, did a bit of window shopping in the cutesy stores, checked out the white interior of the hilltop church and then headed back to the train to get an afternoon ride home.

Altea was pretty cute but we did not enjoy the crammed long tram rides. We started to rethink our plans to visit a new beach town every day. It was early November and it was weird to see full trains to a beach town, and then see the beach empty because it was November…. What would it be like in high season? Those trams must really be packed. We were also looking at the beach towns online and felt than many of them were going to be geared for British and other Northern European tourists. That is not really our objective when coming to see a Spanish beach town. I don’t need Irish pubs, fish and chip restaurants, and T-shirt shops. So, we decided to look for something else to see while in Alicante.

Elche

We found Elche (also spelled Elx in Valencian), which is home to the only UNESCO Historic site around these parts – The Palmeral of Elche. Elche is famous for the thousands of palm trees all around it’s downtown, mostly in surrounding parks, including the municipal park known as The Palmeral. It was also not a beach town so we didn’t need to get on the crowded beach light rail that we had taken to Altea. We did find a cheap train that went there a few times a day, and then we didn’t do much other research about our destination. Not many people got on to our train. When we got to Elche, nobody got off except us! We immediately knew we had screwed up. Nobody was around, and we could clearly see the main town far in the distance. Apparently, this was a new train station and there was no bus service, UBER or taxi service into town. Google told us it was a 2 hour walk into town. And, we found out it was 2 hours before a train could return us to Alicante. We debated our options. The ticket lady did not speak much English, but gave us a phone number to a taxi company that didn’t answer the phone. That was not helpful. We felt stuck…. and really stupid for our lack of research

After wandering around the station for a half an hour, I found a security guard that was willing to help us. She spoke english, and was kind enough to to call us a taxi!!! We were saved and were able to get into the town of Elche. Pretty sure the folks at the train station and the taxi driver were wondering why the heck the silly Americans came all this way to go to their municipal park?? We had thought that this was a really small town, but we were wrong. It is big enough to hold 234,000 people and now also big enough to have a commuter train station downtown and a brand new train station 5 miles from town (Alicante, that is). Now we know! We saw the sites (below), had lunch, and then took the commuter rail home that afternoon.

The UNESCO heritage site was the thousands of historic palms (many varieties), including date palms all around town. The Romans brought them here 2000 years ago, the Moors cultivated them a little more and then the Christians took over in the middle ages and kept the date palm crop going. At one point there was over 200,000 palm trees in the city. Now, dates aren’t that huge of an industry, but it is still big enough to have palms trees in parks that encircle the city. You can make a loop around the city on a bike and travel through date palms for 10 kilometers.

The other reason that Elche is famous, is the ancient statue – “The Dame of Elche”. This 4th century bust of a ‘queen’ was found by a kid on a farm in 1897. It made it’s way to the Louvre for a while, and then was kept in the Prado in Madrid after World War 2, before finally being in the national archeological museum in Madrid. But we went to see all about it in the Elche archeological museum. There were several reproductions of “The Dame” and some great exhibits, along with Roman and Moorish ruins and a medieval fort, that explained the history of this area through centuries. I thought it was all pretty interesting to see how this related to all the other archeology museums we have been to in the past couple of years.

So, those were our day trips away from Alicante. I have a lot of great pics from our 9 day stay and those will be in this post.