The Benidorm Bulletin — Issue 76 | 6 – 13 September 2026

From the Editor

Pride finishes today and the town exhales. What follows is the week a lot of you have never seen, because it only exists for about six days a year: the bit between the last float and the start of the fiesta season proper, when the Old Town is warm, busy enough to feel alive and quiet enough to get a table. If you are here now, you have picked well without knowing it.

While one half of the town sleeps that off, the other half is in a hall on the edge of the Old Town at noon today, starting its own year. That is the lead, and it is the thing I would most like you to read, because the next ten weeks in this town are the best of the twelve and hardly any of it gets written about in English.

There is also an answer I owed somebody. Two weeks ago Tracey wrote the letter that opened last week’s issue, and then wrote back with a follow-up question I could not answer properly on the spot. I asked her for a week. The week is up, so it is at the top of this one.

Today the Town Stops Performing and Starts Its Own Year

Pride ends this morning, the Spanish schools are back, and at noon a fiesta hall on the edge of the Old Town opens its bar. What follows is the best ten weeks of the year, and almost none of it is staged for you.

Benidorm has two calendars. There is the one you have seen, which runs from Easter to the end of August and is built entirely around visitors, and there is the other one, which starts round about now and which most people who come here have never encountered at all. Today is the hinge between them, more or less to the hour.

You can watch it happen. At midday today, at the Casa del Fester, the Moros y Cristianos association presents the boato of the Christian king: the costumes, the retinue, the staging that will come down the street in October. This year the crown belongs to the Filà Cruzados, with Alberto Sánchez as king and Silvia Gois as queen. There is a bar from eleven at fiesta prices rather than seafront ones. It is free, it is not advertised in any language you read, and nobody involved is remotely bothered whether a tourist turns up. Which is precisely why you should.

From there it runs almost without a break. The Moros y Cristianos take over the first weekend of October, four days of it, thousands of costumes, live bands and black-powder muskets loud enough to set off car alarms. Then in November come the Festes Majors Patronals, which are the real ones, when the whole town goes down to the beach to watch a boat burn. Neither is put on for anybody’s benefit but the town’s, and both are better for it. I have written both up properly, dates and all, because almost nobody has in English.

Here is why I care about this more than I probably should. Benidorm gets called a place with no culture roughly once a week by somebody who has never been, and the tidy answer is to point at the Old Town or the Bofill park. That is not the answer. The answer is that this town keeps a fiesta calendar that has nothing whatsoever to do with tourism, that it has kept it right through fifty years of being the most visited resort in Spain, and that it is about to spend the next ten weeks on it while the pavements are half empty. A place with no culture would have quietly sold that off for a beach party in 1978.

What this means for you:

• If you are here now, this is the emptiest week in the month. Do the thing you have been avoiding because of the queue
• If you are booking, October and November are the two months to look at, and they are the two nobody thinks of
• Quiet does not mean cheap any more. See the first question further down, because that one surprises people

☀️ What’s On This Week

Today is loud and then the week goes quiet, and the quiet is the good bit. There is exactly one thing in the diary after Sunday lunchtime, which is why this is the week to do the things that normally involve a queue.

If you would rather have the whole month in front of you than a week at a time, it is all on the What’s On page. I keep that one updated as things are announced rather than writing it once in August and walking away, so it is worth a look before you book anything and again the week before you fly.

And that, genuinely, is the diary. Which is the point. Monday to Saturday this week is the emptiest stretch in the September calendar, the Spanish schools are back, the water parks and the two Natura parks are on their autumn hours, and the queue for everything is a fraction of what it was a fortnight ago. If there is something here you have been putting off because of the crowds, do it on Tuesday.

Coming Up: the Benidorm Disco Festival takes over the Gran Hotel Bali from Wednesday 16 to Saturday 19 September, four days of seventies soul, eighties synth pop and nineties dance floor, with pool parties and beach brunches in the daytime and two disco parties a night. Then the Fiestas del Barrio Imalsa II on the 25th to 27th, the Iberia Festival at the Julio Iglesias auditorium on Saturday 26th with 091, La Frontera and Mikel Erentxun, and then October opens with the Moros y Cristianos. The whole month sits here: What’s On in Benidorm Old Town.

🍺 Where to Wet Your Whistle

Three from the Old Town again, and all three are places I go to rather than places I have read about.

The five-minute stop: Bar Los Pinchos Morunos, Calle del Rosari 4, just off the pedestrianised Paseo de la Carretera. It has been there since 1968 and it is barely a bar at all. It is a hole in a wall that opens after dark, with a few standing tables outside and a charcoal grill. There is one thing on the menu, the pincho moruno, a small marinated pork kebab off the charcoal, and it comes normal or picante. That is it. That is the whole proposition.

Very little English is spoken, so pointing helps, and nobody minds. You stand up, you eat two, you have a beer, you carry on. It is not dinner and it is not meant to be. It is the thing you do at half past nine on the way to somewhere else, and it costs about as much as a bag of crisps at the airport. Walk past it a hundred times and you would never look twice, which is exactly why I keep telling people about it. My write-up, with a photograph so you know what you are looking for.

The proper sit-down: Restaurante Marisquería Córdoba, on the corner where the Paseo de la Carretera runs into Tapas Alley. Seafood is the whole point: prawns, octopus, a seafood paella worth ordering properly rather than out of habit, and the tapas alongside it if you would rather graze. I have spent a great many afternoons in there over a beer and a plate of ham watching the alley go past, which is not an efficient use of a day and is one of the best.

Two practical notes. It is on a corner everybody walks past, so in high season there is often a queue, and this week there will not be. Go now. And take the outside tables if the evening is warm, because the inside is comfortable and retro but the alley is the show. The full review is here, and if you would rather work the whole run than sit down, the Old Town tapas guide is the one to take with you.

The drink: not a bar this week but a street. The stretch of the Alameda that everyone calls Gin Street, running past Pinocchio’s ice cream down towards Tapas Alley and the beach, is where the Old Town does cocktails properly. Café Gusto Mojito is the one for a mojito and does not pretend otherwise.

The one to actually hunt for is Bar Zarzosa, tucked down a side street off it. It is rustic in the genuine sense rather than the interior-design sense, it will not suit everybody, and if you like the sort of bar that has clearly not been refurbished on purpose, you will be very happy. Have one on the Alameda where the world goes past, then go and find Zarzosa for the second. That is the correct order, and here is the street itself, so you know which stretch I mean before you set off.

🎭 Tonight’s Entertainment

Every listing you will ever read about entertainment here starts at nine at night, which is fine if you are twenty-five and a nuisance if you are not. So this week, the afternoon.

Tiki Town on the seafront has live music most days from roughly one to three in the afternoon, which fills the gap almost nobody else bothers with. Daytona Rock on Avenida Alcoy starts at midday most days, and next door Heartbreak goes from half past one in the afternoon until nearly three in the morning without appearing to stop. If your idea of a good day out is a cold drink and a live band at two o’clock rather than eleven, that row on Alcoy is where you want to be, and Tuesday and Wednesday are the quiet ones if you would rather not be in a crush.

All of which is drawn from a much bigger piece of work: I have gone through every live-music venue in the Old Town, venue by venue and night by night, with who is on and when. Nobody else has that written down in English and it took a while, so use it.

The Old Town’s own live-music room is The Guinness Bar at Avenida Alcoy 5, which is the most reliable thing in this section: two shows a day, one at four in the afternoon and one from nine, with the same handful of residents rotating through the week. Lee, Liam, David, Cesc and Feedback are the names on the board. It is not a tribute circuit and nobody is pretending to be anybody. Round the corner on Doctor Orts Llorca, The Bodhrán has live music every night of the week, and Tuesday is the Martin Kent show, which is impressions and is a great deal funnier than that sentence makes it sound.

If you do want the full tribute treatment, the strip is filed up to Wednesday this week and three rooms stand out that this newsletter has never sent you to. The Explorers Club has the widest spread of anywhere: Chris Chronos and Matt Fisher through the early evening, a reggae night on Sunday, Queen by Charlie, The Duggy Boyz doing rock and roll on Tuesday, and 2Kool on the soul classics. Tropical Bar is the pop one, Taylor Swift and Beyoncé on Sunday, Pink and Katy Perry on Monday, Coldplay and Bruno Mars on Tuesday, Dua Lipa on Wednesday, and the Venga Boys turning up at midnight more often than is strictly reasonable. The Royal Arrow is the one for the older end of the room: Amy Winehouse, The Drifters, an Abba show and Chloe’s Adele, which is the pick of the three.

The usual caveat, and it matters more than ever after a Pride week. Nothing is filed from Thursday onwards, which means nothing about how busy Thursday is and everything about how busy the bar staff are. Take any printed start time as a rough guide. The chalkboard outside is always right and the internet frequently is not.

☀️ Weather Watch — Early September

Last week’s thirty-six degrees was the last shove of the summer and it has gone. What is left is the good stuff. Today and Monday are the warmest of it, around thirty or thirty-one, and then it settles into the high twenties for the rest of the week under clear skies. The nights are where you will notice the difference: the small hours have come down several degrees on a fortnight ago, and by the end of the week you may want something with sleeves at eleven o’clock, which is a sensation nobody in this town has had since May. No rain in the forecast at all.

What to pack: exactly what you would have packed a fortnight ago, plus one long-sleeved thing for the evening that you will feel silly carrying and will be glad of by Thursday. The sea is holding at about twenty-six degrees, which is warmer than the air will be at breakfast time, and it will stay swimmable long after you have gone home. This is the fortnight where the water is better than the weather, and the people who swim before nine get the best hour of the day to themselves.

❓ You Asked…

Q: Everyone told me September would be quiet. I’ve just tried to move my dates and there’s nothing. What’s going on?

You have been given advice that stopped being true a few years ago and nobody updated it. This half of September was ninety per cent booked before the month even started. Not full for August. Full for September, in advance. The old idea that the town empties the moment the British schools go back died when the rest of Europe worked out that this is the better month, and the hotels stopped discounting accordingly. It is still calmer on the pavement than August, which is what people actually mean when they say quiet, and it is not remotely cheaper at short notice. If you want a September holiday here at a September price, the move is to book it in February.

Q: We’re coming for the Moors and Christians in October. Where do we stand to watch it, and is it in the Old Town?

Not in the Old Town, and this catches almost everybody out. The parades run through the new town and finish around the Plaza de la Hispanidad, so if you plant yourself on the Balcón del Mediterráneo waiting for it you will have a lovely evening and see nothing. It runs Thursday 1 to Sunday 4 October. The one to be there for is the Gran Entrada on the Saturday, when both armies come down in full costume with their bands, and it runs three hours or more, so pick your spot with the sun behind you and something to sit on. Be warned about the arcabucería, the black-powder muskets. They are extremely loud, they are meant to be, and if you have a dog or a nervous small child, plan around them rather than being surprised by them. It is the biggest thing this town does that has nothing whatever to do with tourism, which is precisely why it is worth seeing. It is all in the Moros y Cristianos guide, and the whole fiesta year sits on the festivals hub.

🔥 Hot Topic

He Hasn’t Spotted You Coming

There is a conversation that happens on the second night of nearly every holiday here, usually over the second drink, and it goes: it’s gone up, hasn’t it. Sometimes it is followed by the theory that they put the prices up when they hear an English accent.

They don’t. I want to be blunt about this, because it is one of the few genuinely unfair things people say about this town. The man behind the bar has had his electricity bill go up by nearly half in four years, and his coffee, his eggs and his meat all cost him meaningfully more than they did. He has put ten cents on a coffee. He has absorbed the rest, and he has done it because he knows precisely what happens to a Spanish bar that gets a name for being dear: the locals stop coming, and the locals are the ones who keep him open in February.

The hoteliers’ association let something slip along the same lines on Thursday. Benidorm has just had the fullest August anybody can remember, and their own comment on it was that more occupancy does not necessarily mean more profit. That is not a sentence a trade body writes when it is having a good year. It is a town running very hard to stand still, and none of that shows up in the price you pay.

So grumble by all means. I do. But aim it somewhere sensible, and not at the family on Calle Santo Domingo who have been quietly eating the difference for four years so that you can still have a beer and a plate of something for less than a pint costs at home. That is the deal Benidorm has always offered, and somebody is paying for it. It isn’t you.

💡 Tip of the Week

Something Is Now Counting Your Days

One dull thing first, because it starts tomorrow and it costs time rather than money. Since the spring every British passport has been scanned into a database at the Spanish border instead of stamped, and airports have been allowed to switch the whole thing off for a few hours when the queue got out of hand. From Monday they can’t. Brussels declined to extend it, nine countries having asked. Nothing to apply for and nothing to pay, but allow more time than you think at passport control in both directions, and do not build a connection on the minimum connection time. Missed connections have doubled since the spring, and no airline will compensate you for a queue that isn’t theirs.

The part almost nobody has clocked is what that database does the rest of the time. British visitors get 90 days in any rolling 180 across the whole Schengen area. The rule is not new. What is new is that it used to be enforced by a tired officer squinting at smudged ink, and is now enforced by a computer that has your exact arrival and your exact departure, every time, shared across twenty-nine countries.

So the old margins have gone. The stamp they forgot to do is not a spare fortnight any more. A week in France in the spring now counts against an autumn month in Spain, because it is one pot of days. And the 180 rolls: it is not a calendar year and it does not reset in January.

Two weeks twice a year and this will never touch you. But a fair few of you winter here, or come for a month at a time, or have a place out here. Put the count on paper before your next trip rather than after it, counting the day you landed and the day you flew as whole days, and see what it leaves you for the winter. Ten minutes now, and a great deal cheaper than finding out at a desk.

🤔 Did You Know?

The fiesta season that begins in the Casa del Fester this lunchtime ends in November with the whole town on the beach watching a boat being set on fire, and the reason for that is one of the strangest founding stories any Spanish town has.

On 16 March 1740, three Benidorm fishermen came upon a small vessel drifting off the coast with nobody aboard. They towed it in. The town took one look at an abandoned boat arriving out of nowhere, concluded that whoever had been on it had died of plague, and did the only sensible thing available to a fishing village in the eighteenth century: they dragged it up the shore and burnt it.

When the fire went out, children picking through the ashes found a wooden image of the Virgin with the Christ Child in her arms, carried in the stern, entirely undamaged. That was taken to be a miracle, and she has been the patron of this town ever since as the Mare de Déu del Sofratge, the Virgin of Suffrage. Benidorm has re-enacted the whole thing on the beach every year since 1971, and the fiestas in her honour fall in the second week of November.

There is something very fitting about the fact that the patron saint of Europe’s most relentlessly modern seaside town arrived by accident, on a boat nobody wanted, and survived being set on fire by the locals. Benidorm has been doing more or less that ever since.

Community Noticeboard

⭐ Got a photo of the Three Kings or the Patronals? — see above. Reply and attach it, and I’ll credit you by first name.

⭐ The whole fiesta year on one page — every fiesta in Benidorm, when it falls and what actually happens at it, on the fiesta calendar. You can also drop the ones you care about straight into your phone’s calendar: benidormoldtown.co.uk/fiestas.

⭐ Start your countdown — put your flight date in and it lives on your phone’s home screen, counting down and nagging you about your passport. Free, ninety seconds, start your countdown.

⭐ Do you run a class visitors can drop into? — yoga, pilates, aqua, walking group, anything. Reply and tell me. See Tracey’s question at the top.

⭐ Nominate a bar — one reader nomination in August has since become a business on the card. Tell me yours and I credit you by name.

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

A Christian king unveiled in a fiesta hall at noon while the other half of town sleeps off Pride, a bar on the Alameda that has clearly not been refurbished on purpose, a bar in the new town where the prices crash like a stock market, and a wooden Virgin who survived being set on fire by the very people who now carry her through the streets. Next week: the run-up to the Disco Festival, and the first proper week of the best ten weeks of the year.

Thanks for reading. Pass it on to anyone with Benidorm on their mind. And two small favours this week, both of which take a minute: if you know a yoga teacher here, Tracey and I would be grateful, and if you have a photograph of the Three Kings parade sitting on your phone, I would be more grateful still.

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

— The Benidorm Bulletin Team