The Benidorm Bulletin — Issue 71 | 2 – 9 August 2026

From the Editor

So here we are. August, the month the whole resort has been rehearsing for since March, and the week the last empty hotel rooms quietly disappear.

There is a knack to Benidorm in high summer, and it isn’t doing more. It’s doing less, later, and in the right order. The Old Town has quietly laid on the two best free evenings of the month this week, one of them on a beach, and neither requires you to book a thing.

Elsewhere: a fresh set of venue picks, an honest word about the English Zone after a rather grim week for the ambulance crews, and the weather doing precisely what you booked it to do. Let’s get on.

The Old Town’s Best Two Nights of August Are Both This Week, and Both Are Free

A cinema screen on the sand and a fundraising dance at the castle. Neither costs a penny, and neither is aimed at you, which is rather the point.

On Friday, the council turns the Playa del Mal Pas into an open-air cinema. Cine en la Playa runs from 7 to 21 August on the little beach tucked round past the castle steps, the one most visitors never find because they’re on Levante with the other forty thousand. A screen goes up, and you sit on the sand and watch a film with the sea behind you.

One honest caveat: the council has confirmed the run but hadn’t published the films or the start times when we went to press. In previous years screenings have begun at half nine and cost nothing, and they fill up, so bring a towel or a folding chair and get there early. Check the boards on the day rather than turning up hopefully.

Then on Saturday there’s a verbena up at the Plaça del Castell, one of two the fiesta associations are running this month. These are not tourist events. They’re fundraisers for the Festes Majors Patronals in November, put on by the peñas and the Cofradía de Nuestra Señora de la Esperanza, which is exactly why they’re worth your evening: live music, montaditos, drinks at prices a local would accept, and a crowd that mostly lives here. Nobody has published a start time. It won’t be early.

You’re welcome at both. That is the whole character of the Old Town in August: the good stuff isn’t laid on for visitors, it’s simply not hidden from them either.

What this means for you:

• Beach cinema at the Mal Pas, from Friday 7 August, free, films and times still to be announced
• Verbena at the Plaça del Castell on Saturday 8 August, free to walk into, second one on the 15th
• Both are a five-minute walk from the top of the Old Town, and both reward turning up early

We’ve put the full month, including the last Concerts al Castell and the island swim, on the site: What’s On in Benidorm Old Town: August 2026.

☀️ What’s On This Week

Beyond Friday and Saturday, which are up top, the week has more going on than it lets on.

One for the swimmers: entries for the l’Illa to Port crossing, the 3.6km swim from the island to the harbour, open at the start of the month and have historically gone inside a couple of hours. The date is pencilled in for Sunday 30 August but was still awaiting formal confirmation as we wrote. Club Náutico Benidorm on the Paseo Colón is the place to ask.

Coming Up: the second castle verbena on Saturday 15 August, and the summer’s last Concerts al Castell on Wednesday 19 August, when a Beatles tribute closes the series at the lookout.

🍺 Where to Wet Your Whistle

Three fresh picks, and this week they’re all within about ninety seconds of each other up in the Old Town.

The pint: the Jolly Roger, which does exactly what it does and has never once pretended otherwise. That is meant as a compliment. Worth knowing on price this summer: English Square still runs the most aggressive happy hours in the resort, roughly €1.50 to €2.50 when one is on, while a pint in the Old Town’s traditional bars rarely tops €3.50. It’s the Levante seafront terraces where you pay for the view, at €3 to €4.50 a go. Ten minutes uphill is worth about a quid a round.

The cocktail: Ku Lounge, and specifically early, before the streets fill. Cocktails run around the €9 mark, which is not the cheapest in Benidorm and isn’t trying to be. They’re properly mixed and properly presented, the staff actually know the list, and it’s the right sort of room for a civilised first drink of the evening rather than a fourth. Sit outside and let the Old Town warm up around you.

The meal, sort of: La Cava Aragonesa, on the Plaça de la Constitució. Its speciality is the yesca, toasted bread with oil and tomato, built from a counter carrying well over a hundred varieties of cold meat, cheese and salted fish. Order two, stand at the bar, point at what looks good, repeat. Regulars report getting a bottle of wine and eight tapas out of it for around €12, and while your mileage will vary, nothing about the prices there has ever felt like a stitch-up. It is loud and it is crowded and it is the single best argument for the Old Town there is.

🎭 Tonight’s Entertainment

The big production rooms are down in the new town, and we’ll come to those. But the Old Town’s own evening entertainment is smaller, closer and cheaper, and to my mind a good deal more fun.

Kaffe Klee does drag cabaret in a room small enough that there is no hiding at the back, which is either the appeal or the warning depending on your temperament. Queens, on the Plaça de la Constitució, is the other Old Town room worth the walk up. Neither publishes a reliable schedule in advance, and neither needs to: you read the board outside after about nine and pick.

If you want the full sequinned production number, that’s the showbar strip along the front, and there’s no pretending the Old Town competes on scale. Two on the boards this week that aren’t the usual suspects: a singer billed as Maria G at the Rock & Roll House on Sunday night, and Soul Girl at Jail Rock on Tuesday. Around them the tribute circuit turns as it always does, with Coldplay at the Morgan Tavern on Monday and Sunday’s familiar cluster of Meatloaf at Sinatra’s, Liam Gallagher at the Western Saloon, Neil Diamond at Philippines 10 and Adele at Rockerfellas.

Make it a deliberate evening rather than a drift: eat up here, walk down for the show, come back up for a last one somewhere that isn’t playing to four hundred people.

And a rare word for Benidorm Palace, which we mention sparingly and only with reason. It has a new immersive show, TRIVIUM, running through to the end of September, which is a genuine departure from the usual formula rather than the same revue with new feathers. If the Palace has been on your list for years, this is a better excuse than most.

Before you head out: start times shift and line-ups change nightly across the whole resort. The board outside the venue and its own Facebook page are the final word, always.

☀️ Weather Watch — Early August 2026

The hottest fortnight of the Benidorm year, behaving itself so far. The forecast into the start of the week has highs around 28 to 30°C under clear skies, and the first third of August typically runs a little warmer still.

What to pack: light everything, a hat you’ll actually wear, and more sun cream than feels sensible. The nights are the thing people forget in early August. They barely drop below the mid-twenties, so if your room’s air conditioning is temperamental, mention it on day one rather than day four. The sea at around 26°C is bath-warm and is the best free cooling system in the resort. Carry water whenever you’re out.

❓ You Asked…

Q: Everywhere’s rammed. Where do we actually get a spot on the beach?

Two answers, and both work. The first is early: on Levante in August the good spots are gone by about half nine, and there is no clever way round that. The second is Poniente, which is the longer, quieter, more Spanish of the two beaches and is never as bad. If you must be on Levante, walk towards the Old Town end. Most people stop at the first gap they see and the far end is always thinner. And do not reserve with a towel and disappear: the council fines for it, and you’ll deserve it.

Q: Is it worth booking restaurants ahead this week, or is that being daft?

For anywhere with a terrace and a view, book. For tapas alley, don’t bother, because that isn’t how it works: you stand, you eat, you move on, and a booking would only slow you down. The middle ground is the sit-down places on the squares, where turning up at eight rather than nine will usually get you a table without a booking, because you’ll be eating before the town does.

🔥 Hot Topic

One Street Is Not a Resort. It Is Still a Problem.

This week an ambulance technician called Amaia was punched in the face on Calle Gerona by a drunk man she had gone out to help. He was on the pavement outside a bar; she was trying to sit him up. He was arrested within minutes by officers who happened to be nearby. She has not been back to work since. Her union is now asking that ambulance crews wait for a police escort before entering the English Zone at night when there is a foreseeable risk, and says a good many of these assaults never get reported at all.

The instinct in a newsletter like this one is to reach for perspective, and the perspective is real. This is a few hundred metres of one district in a resort that took more than three million visitors last year. Families have holidayed here happily for decades and will this week. The Old Town, a twenty-minute walk away, might as well be a different country. Anyone reading “Benidorm is unsafe” into this has not been.

But perspective is not the same as a shrug, and the defensiveness Benidorm reaches for whenever the English Zone is mentioned does the town no favours. If paramedics need a police escort to do their job on a British-facing street in August, that is not a reputational problem to be managed. It is a straightforward failure that a resort of this size and this competence should be embarrassed by. The council has shown it can act when it wants to, most recently with a serious operation against drug dealing in the same district.

Benidorm’s great strength has always been that it takes people as it finds them and doesn’t sneer. That generosity ought to extend furthest to the woman who turns up at two in the morning to help a man too drunk to stand. She deserves rather better than a punch and a panic attack, and the town deserves better than the headlines that follow.

💡 Tip of the Week

If You’re Booking, Book September

A useful number for anyone planning next year, or a second trip this one. The regional hoteliers’ association is forecasting around 92 per cent occupancy across the Valencian Community this August, and the average Benidorm room rate for the month is pushing towards 200 euros a night. That is the price of coming when everyone else does. Shift the same holiday to the middle of September and you get a sea that is still around 26°C, days in the high twenties, restaurants that can seat you, a beach with room on it, and a bill that looks entirely different. The locals have known this for years, which is precisely why September in Benidorm is quietly the best month of the lot.

🤔 Did You Know?

The high-rises everyone loves to sneer at were a deliberate decision, and an unusually far-sighted one. Benidorm’s 1956 general development plan, drawn up when the town was a fishing village of a few thousand people, set out to build upwards precisely so it wouldn’t have to build outwards. More than sixty per cent of the municipality was left undeveloped as a result.

Which produces a pleasing irony. The resort held up as the great example of Mediterranean overdevelopment concentrated its concrete into a few square miles and left the hills alone, while a good deal of the Spanish coast quietly smeared low-rise villas along every bay it could find. Benidorm has been accused of many things. Sprawl isn’t one of them.

Community Noticeboard

⭐ Been to the beach cinema before? — tell us what they showed and whether you got a spot, over on our Facebook page. We’ll pass the tips on before Friday.

⭐ Who’s looking after you this summer? — the Benidorm bar, restaurant or café that’s been good to you. Just type the name in the comments and we’ll take a look.

⭐ Join the chat — our Facebook group is the friendliest corner of Benidorm online. Come and say hello.

A film on the sand, a dance at the castle, and a sea warm enough to stay in until your fingers wrinkle. Next week we’ll have the second verbena, the run-up to the last Concerts al Castell, and whatever August throws at us in between.

Thanks for reading. Pass it on to anyone with Benidorm on their mind.

Until next time — keep the sun on your face and the sangria cold. ☀️

— The Benidorm Bulletin Team