One of the things that automatically triggers off the greatest nostalgia when we remember past leisure times is discovering how, in one photo after another, we have captured a quality of light so brilliant that its impression will remain for ever on the photographic paper and which has nothing to do with what now surrounds us. In our album, between Denia and Alicante are more than a hundred kilometres of coastline, palm plantations, mediaeval city walls, villages of long, warm afternoons and slow nightfalls in which centuries of history are superimposed.
From the Arab castle of Denia to “El Barrio†or the old city of Alicante, Mediterranean architecture of luminous stone set atop of steep mounds, shadows of exotic palm trees and beaches of white sand. Urban beaches and tucked-away coves. Like the Punta Raset and the Rotes beach in Denia, or the Cala Penyal, Calalga or the Fossa beach in Calpe – the attractions of which were discovered by Hemingway already in the ‘thirties – a town adorned by the Ifach promontory, a rock which symbolises the Costa Blanca (White Coast), as also does the blue cupola of the church in Altea.
Alicante, dominated by the Castle of Santa Barbara, is a cultural focal point, a city of rambling palm groves which recall their past at every moment, illuminated by the bonfires of St John’s night and delighting in the extensive legacy of its gastronomy. In the Bay formed between the Capes of Huertas and Santa Pola, historical Alicante emerges full of light. That light so clear that twists and turns amongst the branches of the orange trees, so abundant they seem to announce that this is a promised land.
Night begins to fall and the coastline turns into stone and sea. The breeze is warm and on the coast and in the ancestral Mediterranean dusk ancient city walls, fortresses, castles and churches emit an ochre-tinged light, like that of a bonfire forever alight.
