Up the hill
The old town
Stacked white houses around the blue-domed church, with the square at the top and the views that put Altea on postcards.
Stairs and slope, every single day.
Central Costa Blanca
Altea
A whitewashed old town stacked up a hill under a blue-tiled dome, with Benidorm's skyline visible along the bay and nothing else in common with it.
A pretty town, and one often described as artistic, which is accurate and also the whole marketing department. Pebble beaches rather than sand, a steep old town, and a quieter register than its neighbours — Benidorm is ten minutes down the tram line and feels like another country.
Photographs: MarixaGil, CC BY-SA 4.0 · Joanbanjo, CC BY-SA 4.0
24,592 (2025)Population
FTTH widely availableFibre
About 50 min by roadTo Alicante airport
TRAM line 9Rail
Slow, and uphillPace
Where in town
Three places called Altea
Which part of town you land in decides what the stay is like — more than the town itself does.
Sea level
The seafront
The pebble front and the promenade between the old town and the marina, where most of the year-round trade is.
North
Altea la Vella and the hills
Inland and uphill behind the town, where the larger houses and the quieter stays are.
A car town.
Working from here
Connectivity, claims apart
- Thick old walls in the old town make in-building coverage a real question
- The seafront and the hill are not the same answer
The hill town and the campus
Altea’s old town is medieval in plan — walls raised after the Christian reconquest of 1244, and inside them a labyrinth of whitewashed fronts climbing to the church1. The church is Our Lady of Solace, and the blue-tiled dome above is its roof.
Less advertised: Altea holds a campus of the Universidad Miguel Hernández, and it is the one with the Faculty of Fine Arts in it1. The artistic reputation has an institution underneath it rather than only a gallery trail.
About a third of residents — 34.5% — are foreign nationals, chiefly Romanian, British and Russian2. The beaches are pebble, not sand1.
The season
The Serra de Bèrnia shelters the town from the north, which is what the mild-microclimate claim rests on1. The measured version: a mean annual temperature of 18.3 °C, about 494 mm of rain and roughly 3,000 hours of sun2.
That puts Altea between its neighbours on the only axis that matters for a long stay — drier than Dénia’s 750 mm, wetter than Benidorm’s 2913.
Working from here
Spain is unusually well wired. FTTP reached 89% of premises in 2021 against an EU average of 34%, and connections of at least 100 Mbit/s reached 72%4.
The variable here is not the town, it is the hill. A stepped old town is a different proposition from a flat one when the thing you are carrying is a laptop and the shopping.
TK: what a connection measures up there, and whether the university campus produces anything useful for someone working remotely. Nobody from this project has stayed in Altea.
References
Suits
- Anyone who wants to live somewhere beautiful and will pay the gradient for it
- Long walkers — the Sierra de Bernia and the Serra Gelada are both close
- Anyone who wants Benidorm's infrastructure without Benidorm's density
Does not suit
- Anyone with mobility limits — the old town is stairs and slope
- Sand swimmers; the beaches here are pebble
- Anyone who needs a lot of choice in February
Along the coast
The other towns
Staying in Altea?
The space profiles say what each house is like to live in, including who it does not suit.