From the Lady of Elche to skyscraper hotels

The history of this region goes back several dozen centuries. Ancient human settlements dating back to the 3rd millennium BC have been discovered in Alicante. The first city, Tossal de Manises, was founded in the 4th century BC by the ancient inhabitants of Spain, who gave the peninsula its name – the mysterious Iberians. Incidentally, the main treasure of the few surviving pieces of Iberian culture was found on the Costa Blanca near the city of Elche. This is a female bust made of white limestone, now world famous as the “Lady of Elche”. Other peoples who visited this land at one time or another in its history also left their traces on this land – the ancient Greeks and Romans, the Phoenicians, the Visigoths and the Moors. In the 13th century, the King of Castile Alfonso X the Wise finally recaptured Alicante from the Muslims, and 50 years later, the King of Aragon Jaime II annexed these lands to the Kingdom of Valencia. Since the end of the century before last, the province has become a favorite resort area for residents of the central and northern regions of the country. Another half century later, foreign tourists began to come here en masse. One of the symbols of the tourist boom was the Bali Hotel, built in 2002 in Benidorm – the tallest in Europe.

You will always be understood

The inhabitants of Costa Blanca speak two languages ​​– Spanish and Valencian. In the territory of the Valencian Community, both languages ​​have official status. There are several hypotheses about the origin of the Valencian language: some scientists believe that Valencian developed from the lower dialects of Vulgar Latin, while others are inclined to consider it as one of the dialects of the Catalan language that received grammatical independence. One way or another, the first literary monuments in Valencian appeared in the 15th century, and more than a century later, the great Cervantes spoke about the language of the inhabitants of Costa Blanca: “Valencian is an elegant language, with which only Portuguese can compete in softness and euphony.”

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