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A Day in Denia

Denia is a really neat, small, seaside town, nestled on the north side of sharp mountains that give the area such an enjoyable micro-climate. Here’s a 3d Google Earth overhead, looking southeast.

Denia has a modestly-busy ferry terminal, fully-stocked marina, and just enough of a downtown to walk around and enjoy different options at mealtime. Despite the small size, though, it’s renown for a yearly gastronomical festival (we barely missed it), a disproportionately-large number of Michelin-rated restaurants, and a huge, tasty, rare red prawn found only one place in the world–the sea trench just off the coast, between Denia and Ibiza. There’s also some interesting public art for a small town, like this sculpture of a bullfighter (I think he lost this one!) just outside our hotel:

Denia also has a nice stretch of beach just beyond the marina, and with two nights scheduled for our stay I was looking forward to giving Mercy some quality, relaxing beach-in-the-sun time after several hectic days of big-city museums and train travel. Unfortunately, when we woke up that morning, here’s what awaited us outside the hotel window:

A charming town? Yes. But the rainy weather was not what we had hoped for–and it didn’t show much sign of letting up. Eventually we decided to brave the rain with a hotel umbrella and walk around a bit. We were drenched anyways–but not before we came across this neat life-sized Lego pirate sculpture in a small plaza just around the corner:

My eventual goal was to at least get within sight of the beach sand–a small victory indeed, given our original objective of an entire day lying in sunny sand. Nevertheless, we persisted. And success! Look, there’s sand in the distance. Technically.

By this point, though, we were drenched. Returning to the hotel, we tried to get a little bit dryer and cozier, with a modest degree of success thanks to some very comfortable hotel robes.

After a long nap, taken to the sound of rain constantly falling on roof and windows, we woke up to a calm and dry evening with perfect weather for walking around and enjoying some Spanish BBQ at Fuego, a restaurant next door to our hotel. It was decent, but made significantly better by the presence of a beautiful lady at my table.

After dinner, we walked around old town Denia and admired the ancient castle, town cathedral, and much-improved weather for a stroll.

We even got the chance to walk back to the beach–all the way to the cresting Mediterranean shore this time–and enjoy the pleasant sound of midnight waves lapping at our toes. (They’re hard to see, but if you squint…)

The next day we’d be taking the ferry out to the islands. I wish we had more time in Denia, but the days we did spend were greatly enjoyed. I’d strongly recommend this town as a best-of-Spain destination–almost like a Moclips of the Mediterranean. But with paella.

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Up the Coast by Tram

As much as we loved Alicante, we were only scheduled to stay there one night before we headed north to Denia. Our hotel was conveniently right across the street from the local market, so we grabbed some snacks for the tram.

A word about the tram: this isn’t high speed rail. In fact, the original horse-drawn train line between Alicante and Denia was one of the older rail corridors in Spain. It’s been continually updated every few decades since it was first operational in 1893, and is nearly complete with the latest upgrade to electric tram cars. It’s a lazy trip up the coast, winding around each nook and climbing alongside each beautiful beach.

It starts out as an urban tram from the beachfront in Alicante where we had walked yesterday, before crawling up through each small coastal town.

This is a really neat tram, and today’s journey, while slow (it would take us three hours to go 75 kilometers, compared to two-and-a-half hours to travel the 360 kilometer distance from Madrid to Alicante the previous day), was something I was really looking forward to.

The views sure didn’t disappoint. At times, we were looking down from our railcar into deep, vivid Mediterranean blue water.

Beautiful beaches, small towns built upon 2,500-year-old Phoenecian settlements with 1,500-year-old Roman bridges and aquaducts… Quite a few gorgeous sites, even if a substantial portion are densely populated with timeshares for British expats.

As we rolled further north through the dry, Mediterranean coast, more and more towns moved further up the increasingly-rocky cliffs. Quite a beautiful scene.

Our tram stopped early, in the scenic town of Calp, while we switched to the bus that would take us the rest of the way to Denia. (The remaining rail was still being upgraded to support the new electric trains.) Calp is an interesting, larger town that–while full of towering timeshare and apartment buildings–reminds me a bit of Rio de Janeiro for the way that it builds out along an isthmus to a rocky point in the sea. Very pretty.

A really interesting transformation took place as we crested the mountain before descending into Denia. The side of the road became regularly blanketed with orange groves and sugar cane, and the landscape in general was significantly greener this close to Valencia. Once the bus dropped us off in Denia, it was a short walk down another scenic marina promenade to our hotel, the Posada del Mar.

How do I begin to describe this place? How about starting with this: when you walk into the lobby, you see in front of the staircase the original stones from the inn first built in the year 1300. They’ve done an amazing job renovating around the ruins (including extracting a number of artifacts for subsequent display on the walls and in floor casings).

Every detail of the interior was amazing, from the wooden banisters and artwork on the stucco walls to the wrought-iron railings. But even that paled in comparison to our room when we walked in the door (complete with Norah Jones playing on the TV when we turned the power on), overlooking the marina. Even the bed was a gorgeous four-poster with curtains, and thankfully not the split-twins we’d pessimistically come to expect in half our Iberian rooms.

That night, smack in the center of Costa Blanca, there was only one meal we wanted to chase: we hunted down the best paella we could find. The result: Ca Pepa Teresa, where a monstrously-big vat of rice and seafood combined with a great bottle of white wine to produce one heck of a memorable meal–even if we came in second place against the French couple next to our table in the time-honored Mediterranean game of “who can shell the shellfish most quickly and neatly with nothing but knife and fork.”

After our meal, we wandered back down Denia’s main street, Calle Marques de Campo. One interesting note: We were definitely in Catalan culture now, with a variety of religious references and subtle differences in common language terms. It was a very scenic night, and after a tasty nightcap of mojitos at our hotel’s bar, we hit the sack pretty hard.