Forget package holidays and Brits Abroad – Alicante is Spain’s latest glow-up

At the top of the Santa Bárbara fortress, I stopped to catch my breath, stunned as much by the steep climb as by the mesmerising view from the battlements.

Between the Mediterranean and the dust-coloured mountains, the city sprawled like a cat in the afternoon sun. In the far distance, the towers of Benidorm caught the last rays in a glimmer of gold. A cruise ship made its majestic way into the harbour.

It’s fair to say that until this moment Alicante had not featured largely on my travel bucket-list. Ever since a memorably horrible 1970s family holiday in a poky flat on the Costa Blanca, I’d regarded it as little more than a synonym for cheapo Brits-abroad tourism of the dreariest kind.

What I’d failed to appreciate, was that this Spanish provincial capital and the suburban seaside sprawl surrounding it are two very different things. A classic example of the “airport town”, Alicante tends to be bypassed by visitors rushing to the resorts of Jávea and Torrevieja.

Compared to Málaga and Palma de Mallorca, which have latterly garnered fame and fortune as short-break destinations in their own right, Alicante is still on the inside lane but – as I discovered on a recent recce – moving steadily in the same direction.

I arrived on a sun-warmed evening in late February, and headed for the Explanada de España, an elegant promenade paved with wave-like mosaic patterns and flanked by palm-trees. I strolled past a wall of mansion blocks with ornate fin-de-siècle facades and fanciful cupolas, passing groups of locals in short sleeves with their jackets over their arms. Where the Explanada ended, El Postiguet – Alicante’s much-loved urban beach – began, its mirror-calm water warm to the touch. All was quiet and easy.

But there is far more here than beach and spring warmth: Alicante has culture and personality in spades, too. There was plenty to admire in the old town’s sandstone palaces, its grand Renaissance churches, and its little squares like the delicious Plaza Gabriel Miró, an urban oasis cooled by plashing fountains and shaded by monumental ficus trees.

Santa Cruz, the once down-at-heel gypsy quarter clinging to the lower slopes of the Benacantil crag (it looms over the town like a lunar mountain), is now a picture-perfect Instagram-ready barrio of whitewashed houselets and geraniums in gaily painted pots.

An elderly gent sat on a wicker chair outside his front door, taking the morning air. Foreign buyers had been snapping up property in Santa Cruz at a tremendous rate, he told me: further proof of Alicante’s ever more cosmopolitan character.

Yet this is a place still firmly wedded to local tradition. On the Rambla de Méndez Núñez, a girl walked by in a heavily embroidered silk skirt and lace headpiece: the costume worn during Alicante’s great midsummer fiesta, Les Fogueres de Sant Joan (June 20-24), when giant figures in garish Disney colours are set alight in the street amid fireworks.

The bonfire-themed Museu de les Fogueres, further up the Rambla, gives an idea of just how enthusiastically (and noisily) the city lets its hair down during that short night’s journey into day.

But the biggest of Alicante’s surprises for me was its food. Truthfully, the city would be worth visiting for its gastronomy alone. A visit to the spectacular Mercado Central, a brick-built food cathedral dating from 1922, was a useful primer in alicantino ingredients like dry-cured tuna mojama, succulent red prawns from the nearby harbour of Santa Pola, and turrón, the almond-based sweetmeat popular at Christmas.

Alicante seemed to have more bars and restaurants per square kilometre even than most Spanish towns of a similar size. There were classy gastro-bars (Manero, A La Sazón, Taberna del Gourmet) and temples to local ingredients – prime among these being the peerless Nou Manolín, where I repaired one night for red prawns a la plancha and crisp-fried baby red mullet.

There were old-fashioned tavern-like tapas bars (Cantó, Cervecería Sento) and rice-forward arrocerias like Dársena, the classic of the genre. Best of all, there was Espacio Montoro in the out-of-town Vistahermosa district, where chef Pablo Montoro practises a thrilling avant-garde cuisine full of trompe l’oeil tricks and unexpected flavours.

In my chats with locals throughout the weekend, there was a common theme: the city is changing, mostly for the better; the streets are cleaner and smarter. What were once the quiet months are now busier than ever, as a new contingent of visitors discovers the charms of its luminous low-season climate.

Yet to me, at least, Alicante still felt a long way from glossy, over-touristed Málaga. I found it a big-hearted place, handsome in a rough-cut kind of way and, crucially, still a little bit ragged and salty around the edges. Precisely the qualities you might want and expect, in fact, from your ideal Spanish seaside city.

Essentials

Iberia (iberia.com) and Easyjet (easyjet.com) both fly from UK airports to Alicante from £46 return.

Paul Richardson was a guest of old-town five-star in a converted convent, Hotel Hospes Amérigo (hospes.com; doubles from £149 per night), sea-front mansion Casa Alberola (casaalberolahotel.com; doubles from £95), and the Alicante Tourist Board (alicanteturismo.com).