Once again we’ve started a new blog series. Recently we’ve booked several trips to Europe and around the UK for over the next few months and decided to turn our galivants into a series of blog posts. The posts will include What to Do, Where to Eat, and Where we Stayed, and will more or less be guides of What to do with 72 Hours or Less in each place.

So here we go!

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Country: Spain

Size/Population: 201.3 km², ~ 332 067 people

Date: Friday – Sunday, Jan 17th – 19th, 2017

Accommodation: AC Hotel by Marriott

 

Alicante sits on the Southeast coast of Spain and seems to be your typical British tourist holiday destination. It wouldn’t be our first choice (nor second or third for that matter) of places to visit but we booked the flights before knowing anything about Alicante, we were just searching for cheap flights to anywhere and they were the cheapest, so we grabbed them.

Alicante is the gateway to Benidorm (another very popular British family holiday destination) and in the summer is probably bustling with beach going tourists, but during the winter it seems to be a quite seaside harbour town, with a lot of places closed for the quiet season.

It was pretty crappy weather over the weekend so we didn’t walk around as much as we normally would have. We spent Saturday morning walking along the beach, and when the rain became too heavy to enjoy being outside, we found our way into the Central Market. We spent a good hour or so wandering the isles watching locals go about their business and even bought some things to take home. Although we passed up on the seafood mixtures of prawns, mini crabs, eels and unknown (to us) fish.

Although we didn’t get around to having Paella we did enjoy some Tapas at La Taberna Del Gourmet. The food was really good, pricey but good. We had Tuna Tartar, baked octopus (which we didn’t like), 65° degree egg with asparagus tips and wild mushrooms, garlic prawns and steak filet with garlic. We highly recommend checking the place out if you’re ever in Alicante.

 

When we booked our accommodation we knew the weather was due to be pretty crappy so we splurged and booked a nice hotel that we wouldn’t mind spending a rainy day in. The gym was small but well equipped, the hot tub had a decent view of the sea, breakfast was decent and had both local and english selections. The overall feel of the hotel was very business casual.