A whitewashed hilltop town where a blue-domed church presides over cobbled streets that artists have been quietly colonizing for sixty years.
The domes give it away before anything else does. From the coast road heading north out of Benidorm, Altea’s old town appears as a knot of white houses climbing a hill, crowned by the twin blue-and-white tiled cupolas of the Church of Our Lady of Consolation, and the contrast against the sky is sharp enough that I actually pulled over the first time I saw it, thinking I’d misjudged the color somehow. I hadn’t. The domes are covered in ceramic tiles that catch the light differently depending on the hour, and locals will tell you, only half-joking, that the church was positioned deliberately so fishermen could spot it from the water and find their way home.
A Fishing Village That Artists Found
Altea has old bones — there was an Iberian settlement here, then a Roman one, and the old town’s layout still traces its Moorish-era street plan, tight and irregular, designed to break the wind and confuse anyone who meant the town harm. But the Altea people know today largely dates from the mid-twentieth century, when painters and sculptors started arriving, drawn by the light and the cheap rents in a town that was, until then, mostly fishermen and farmers growing oranges on the terraced hills behind it. The University of Alicante later opened a Fine Arts faculty here, cementing Altea’s reputation, and the old town is still dense with small galleries, ceramic workshops, and studios tucked into houses with wrought-iron balconies dripping bougainvillea.
The Plaza and the Pebble Shore
Everything in the old town funnels eventually toward the Plaza de la Iglesia, the small square in front of the church, paved in a rippling black-and-white pebble mosaic that locals call empedrado — a craft you see all along this coast but rarely done with this much care. I sat on the church steps at sunset with the whole square glowing gold, watching the light shift over the domes exactly the way everyone had told me it would, and it still managed to be better than I expected. Down at sea level, Altea’s beach is famously all pebble, no sand, which keeps the water strikingly clear and keeps the town from ever quite tipping into the mass-tourism sprawl of its neighbor Benidorm a few kilometres south. From the seafront promenade you can see Benidorm’s skyline of towers on the horizon, a reminder of how differently these two towns, barely separated, chose to grow.
When to go: May, June, and September give warm sea temperatures with manageable crowds; the golden-hour light on the church domes is best in the hour before sunset year-round, but especially vivid in autumn.