Alicante

The Explanada de España runs along the harbour at the foot of the city centre, a broad promenade under rows of palms, paved with a mosaic of red, black and cream marble laid in rippling waves. It is Alicante's evening walk, at its fullest on summer nights, when the terraces on its inland side spill on to the stone. Across the road, yachts lie moored along the quays of the marina, and a walk out along the harbour looks back at the palms, the city front and the castle rock above them.

Where the Explanada ends at the Puerta del Mar, the Postiguet begins: the beach in the middle of town, a curve of pale sand directly beneath the castle. Above the sand, the bare cliff of Mount Benacantil forms the Cara del Moro, the Moor's Face, a crag shaped like a face in profile. On summer days the beach fills from mid-morning.

The castle of Santa Bárbara crowns Mount Benacantil, the 166-metre rock that rises straight out of the city centre. Its walls step down the hill in three enclosures, from the oldest stonework at the summit to the artillery bastions lower down, and the ramparts look over the harbour, the roofs of the old town, the coast running north and, on clear days, the low line of the island of Tabarca out to sea. The easy way up is a lift: a tunnel from the Avenida de Jovellanos, across the road from the Postiguet, leads into the rock to a shaft that rises to the castle. On foot, a path climbs the slope above the old town through the terraced gardens of the Parque de la Ereta, a steep walk best kept for the cool of morning or evening, or for the way down.

At the foot of the Ereta, on the slope above the old town, Santa Cruz is a cluster of small whitewashed houses with coloured shutters, flowerpots hung on the walls and bougainvillea over the doorways, joined by stepped alleys too steep and narrow for cars. Near the top, the little chapel of Santa Cruz looks out over the rooftops to the harbour. In Holy Week the quarter's brotherhood carries its images down these steps on the shoulders of its bearers, a procession that packs the lanes.

Below Santa Cruz, the old town, known simply as El Barrio, is a grid of narrow streets of low, colour-washed houses, quiet by day and busy at night, when its bars make it the centre of the city's nightlife. At its eastern edge, near the foot of the castle rock, the Basilica of Santa María, a Gothic church raised on the site of the town's main mosque, faces its square with an ornate baroque doorway. Across the square, the MACA, the museum of contemporary art, fills the Casa de la Asegurada, a seventeenth-century granary, with the twentieth-century art that the painter Eusebio Sempere, born in the province, gave to the city, alongside his own geometric work.

A few streets west, the Co-Cathedral of San Nicolás de Bari is a sober seventeenth-century church under a great dome, with a cloister beside it. Nearer the sea, the town hall is an eighteenth-century baroque palace with a long façade between two towers; inside, at the foot of its main staircase, a small plate marks the cota cero, the point from which heights above sea level are measured across mainland Spain. Close by on Calle Gravina, the Museo de Bellas Artes Gravina fills an eighteenth-century palace with painting from Alicante and its province, from the Renaissance to the early twentieth century.

West of El Barrio, the Rambla de Méndez Núñez runs inland from the Explanada, and beyond it lies the Centro, the grid of streets that holds most of the city's shops. Near the top of the Rambla, on the Avenida Alfonso X el Sabio, the Mercado Central is a market hall of the early twentieth century and still the city's working food market. Its stalls are heaped with fish and shellfish, fruit and vegetables, olives and the salted fish of this coast, such as mojama, cured tuna loin. It is a morning market, liveliest well before lunch.

On the landward side of the castle hill, the MARQ, the province's archaeological museum, fills the former hospital of San Juan de Dios. A winner of the European Museum of the Year Award, it follows the land around Alicante from prehistory through its Iberian settlements and the Roman town of Lucentum to the medieval and modern city. The tram stops close by.

North-east of the centre, the shore runs past the small beach of the Albufereta and the rocky coves of the Cabo de la Huerta to the Playa de San Juan, a long, straight beach of fine sand backed by a promenade and apartment blocks, which continues as Muchavista into the neighbouring town of El Campello. It has room to spare when the Postiguet is full, and the tram follows the coast out to it from the city centre.

Alicante cooks from the rice kitchens of eastern Spain, and rice, eaten at midday, is its signature: arroz a banda, cooked in fish stock and served with alioli, arroz negro, black with squid ink, and arroz con costra from Elche, baked under a crust of egg. Turrón, the almond nougat of Christmas, comes in two kinds, both made at Jijona in the hills inland: turrón de Alicante, hard, with whole almonds set in honey and egg white, and turrón de Jijona, soft, made from ground almonds. During the Hogueras, the bonfire festival of June, the city eats coca amb tonyina, a flat pie filled with tuna, with early black figs.