Ask for a paella lesson in Alicante and get handed chicken and rabbit instead of a ladle of fish stock, and you are looking at a workshop that learned its recipe somewhere else entirely. Salmorreta, not Valencian paella Alicante’s rice tradition runs on salmorreta, a paste of dried ñora peppers, garlic and tomato sautéed slowly in olive oil, then worked into a rockfish and crab stock. Workshops built around this start at the steps of Mercado Central around 10:00, walk the market stalls to pick cuttlefish, red shrimp and the dried peppers themselves, then move to a teaching kitchen to build the stock, whip allioli by hand with a mortar and pestle, and cook a pan chasing the crisp socarrat crust on the bottom.

Coordinating twelve people around a single dinner reservation in Alicante is harder than booking the whole boat, which is why most group organizers here plan around a shared activity instead of a shared table. Chartering the whole boat Sailing catamarans out of the marina come in sizes built for exactly this: 30 to 60 passengers, with a barbecue lunch, drinks, and paddleboards included on a typical half-day charter past Mount Benacantil toward Cabo de las Huertas.

A 200-meter tunnel bored straight into a mountain, ending in a high-speed lift that pops out onto castle battlements, is the kind of thing that makes an 8-year-old forget they are on a history trip at all. Into the mountain, for free (mostly) That tunnel starts on Avenida Juan Bautista Lafora, directly opposite Postiguet Beach, and rises 166 meters through Mount Benacantil to Castillo de Santa Bárbara . The castle grounds and battlements are free to enter; the lift itself costs €2.