The Benidorm Bulletin — Issue 82 | 18 – 25 October 2026

From the Editor

Four weeks ago I wrote something in this space that I was not sure I should send. I had asked you twice for photographs and heard nothing back, and I said it was starting to feel like one person doing everything. I asked you, next time, to help a guy out.

You did. You sent more than 250 photographs and videos: kings on their floats, Dad’s Army outside Times Square, blue domes in Altea, the Peñón at Calpe, this month’s Moros parade at full size, and a view of the whole Wednesday market from above that nobody else has. Every attachment has been opened and looked at, and a good number are already working on the website. The block below shows you where.

Thank you. I mean that properly. The rest of the issue is the rice fortnight’s full list, which has finally been published, a wet weekend, the clocks going back, and a question about Remembrance that I cannot yet answer and suspect one of you can.

Your Photographs Are on the Site Now

About thirty of you replied. Here is what your pictures are doing.

Until this month the day trips page had one real photograph on it, of the waterfalls at Algar. Every other town sat on a plain blue card, because I will not illustrate a place with a picture of somewhere else. Four of those cards now carry your photographs instead, each with your name on it.

That is Leanne’s Altea, Vicky’s Calpe, Annette’s Guadalest and Steve’s Villajoyosa. Elsewhere, the Three Kings page now has Peter’s kings on their float, William’s giant Melchor, Gaspar and Baltasar on the Balcón at night, Stewart’s shepherd walking his geese along the route, and Leanne’s dancers under the Christmas lights. And the fancy dress day the Thursday after the Patronals, which until you wrote in had no picture at all, now has Janet’s and Andrew’s on the Patronals page.

The rest are filed by place, waiting for the page that needs them. Peter’s and Sam and Wayne’s pictures of this month’s Gran Entrada, at full size, are earmarked for the Moros y Cristianos guide. Richard’s Easter processions will come out when Holy Week does. Nobody’s photograph goes up with the location data still in it, and nobody’s surname goes anywhere.

One more, if you have it. The Patronals run from 6 to 11 November, and apart from the fancy dress we hold almost nothing of Benidorm’s own week: the boat brought ashore, the processions, the flower offering, the fireworks. Any year will do. Reply with them attached, and please, no close-ups of children.

The Rice List Is Out: Eighteen Kitchens, €25 to €55

Last week nobody had published who was taking part. Now they have, and the dearest menu and one of the cheapest come from the two kitchens that took this year’s tapas prizes.

The rice fortnight, the XV Jornadas de los Arroces de la Tierra, started on Friday and runs to Sunday 25 October. The list was announced on Tuesday the 13th at l’Hort de Colón (more on that house in Did You Know): eighteen restaurants, down from 24 last year, with menus from €25 to €55 a head, roughly £21 to £47. Every one includes a local starter, a rice main course, a pudding and a drink.

The interesting pair is at either end of the price list. La Fava, on Calle La Palma with its door on Calle Asunción, is the dearest at €55, and it is cooking one rice at a time: hake and spinach until Wednesday the 21st, then onion and salt cod from the 22nd to the 24th. Taberna Andaluza, on Calle Esperanto, is €25, for a creamy rice of Iberian pork with mushrooms and young garlic. Both took prizes in this year’s tapas and pintxos competition. So the question this fortnight is a fair one: is the €30 between them worth it? If you eat at both, I would very much like to know.

Three names will be familiar from these pages. La Cava Aragonesa, on Plaça de la Constitució, is €30, with a different rice most days, including the old Valencian bean-and-turnip rice and a baked rice. Bar Mal Pas is €28. And La Pinta Beach, from the cocktail competition, is €25. Down at the harbour, Club Náutico, Marisquería El Puerto and La Posada del Mar sit side by side on Paseo de Colón, so a wet lunchtime there is a matter of choosing a door.

☀️ What’s On This Week

A pink march, a Virgin from Madrid, and the town’s social clubs counting down to their own fiestas.

The What’s On page has the whole month, and it is kept up to date as things are announced rather than written once and left. Every fiesta to the end of the year is on the fiesta calendar.

And the markets. Foietes is Wednesday only, so the 21st. Rincón de Loix is Wednesday and Sunday, and the Rastro at El Cisne Thursday, Saturday and Sunday. The market days page has the buses.

Coming Up: Halloween on Saturday the 31st, then the Patronals from 6 to 11 November, Benidorm’s own week, with the fancy dress day the Thursday after. All of it is on the festivals guide, and the November dates go on What’s On as they are confirmed.

🎭 Tonight’s Entertainment

For the Old Town’s rooms, residencies and who plays where, the live-music page is the bigger piece of work this section is drawn from; nobody else has it written down in English. On the strip, the listings have Sunday to Tuesday filed and nothing beyond. So this week, rather than a list of rooms, pick your decade.

Sunday is soul. 2Kool do soul classics at The Explorers Club, Soultown bring northern soul to Jail Rock, and Jonathan Hawkins, a soul singer, has the late slot at the Rock & Roll House.

Monday is the Eighties, more or less. Wham and George Michael at The Explorers Club, CUJAM doing UB40 at Sinatras, and, for anyone who would rather be in the late Nineties, the Venga Boys at the Tropical Bar.

Tuesday is the Fifties and Sixties, and this is the night I would plan round. Dalton and then Kevin Cat Rhythm at the Rock & Roll House, The Rock & Rollers followed by The Duggy Boyz, a Blues Brothers act, at The Explorers Club, and at Jail Rock, Nikki as Soul Girl with northern soul, then Rude Girl with ska. Three rooms, a short walk apart, and not a chart hit between them.

I have left the start times out, because the listings get them wrong often enough that I do not trust them. Check the board outside, or the venue’s Facebook page, on the day.

☀️ Weather Watch — Late October

This is the week October changes its mind. When we checked AEMET on Wednesday, it had showers for Saturday, rain most of Sunday, and the afternoon highs falling from 25°C to about 21°C, with nights down to 14 or 15°C. A forecast five days out is a forecast, not a promise, and the long-run averages for late October are kinder than that: low twenties, dry more often than not. But this is the first weekend since the spring that a coat would not look silly.

What to pack: a light waterproof and one proper warm layer, alongside the swimming things, because the sea is still warmer than the evenings. And bear in mind that once the clocks go back next Sunday, the sun sets at around a quarter past six rather than a quarter past seven, so the walk back along the front happens in the dark.

❓ You Asked…

Q: We’ll be in Benidorm for Remembrance this year, and my husband is a veteran. Is there a service we can go to?

This is the question I most want to answer well, and I cannot yet answer it fully, so here is what is known and what is not.

The Royal British Legion’s big Benidorm event has, in recent years, been in October rather than November: the launch parade for the Costa Blanca Poppy Appeal. Last year it was on a Saturday in mid-October, starting on Avenida de Castellón and coming along the Levante front behind the Torrevieja Pipes and Drums, with the mayor and the British ambassador there. When this went to press, no date had been announced for this year’s. The Legion’s national appeal launches on Thursday 22 October, so it would be no surprise if Benidorm’s followed soon after.

For Remembrance Sunday, 8 November, and for the 11th itself, I have found nothing published at all. That does not mean nothing happens; it means nobody has put it online.

So, over to you. If you have been to a service or a two minutes’ silence in Benidorm in November, or you belong to a branch that holds one, reply and tell me where and when. We have asked in the Facebook Group too. Whatever comes in, I will check it and print it here before the 8th.

🔥 Hot Topic

Stop Changing the Clocks. Then Pick Summer.

A year ago the Spanish government asked the rest of the EU to stop putting the clocks back and forward, arguing that the energy saving is small and the cost to sleep and health is not. Brussels said it still agreed in principle and commissioned another study. The proposal has been stuck between the member states since 2019, because they have never agreed which time to keep. So next Sunday the clocks go back, as they will again in March.

Here is the complication. Spain is already an hour ahead of where its geography says it should be. It sits largely west of Greenwich, level with Britain, yet it has kept Central European time since 1940. Stay on summer time all year and a Benidorm sunrise in January would come at around twenty past nine.

I would take that, and I suspect most of you would too. This is a town that lives in the evening. The walk along the front with the light going, the drink that starts at seven and is somehow still going at eleven: that is the product. An extra hour of evening light from November to March, in exactly the months the winterers are here, is worth more to Benidorm than an extra hour of morning, when half the town is still asleep anyway.

The other side is real, though. Ask anyone who takes children to school in the dark, or opens a café at seven. So: lighter evenings or lighter mornings? Reply and pick one.

💡 Tip of the Week

Flying Home on the 25th? You Have Been Given an Hour

Britain changes the same night. The UK goes back at two in the morning, Spain at three, which is the same moment. So Benidorm stays an hour ahead of home, and nothing about the difference changes.

Your flight does not move. Departure times are always local, and so is the pick-up time on your transfer voucher. Your phone will change itself. The clock in the apartment, the one on the hire car’s dashboard and the watch on your wrist will not, and those are what make people early or late.

So spend it. If you go home on Sunday, you get one more hour than you thought. A last breakfast that is not rushed, a last walk along the front, or a last rice lunch before the fortnight closes. I know which I would choose.

🤔 Did You Know?

The house where the rice fortnight was launched on Tuesday is named after a ship. In 1885 a Benidorm sea captain, Vicente Zaragoza Ortuño, bought the orchard behind his home on the Paseo de la Carretera, about half a hectare with a well, a waterwheel, fruit trees and olives, and built a two-storey house on it that same year.

The sign over the front door still reads Colón. It came off the ship he captained, the Colón, and the house has been l’Hort de Colón, Colón’s orchard, ever since. His family gave it to the town in 1988, and it is now a small museum of how a seafaring household lived in the 1880s, with visits arranged by the council’s heritage department.

It is worth remembering when someone tells you Benidorm was a fishing village until the bikini arrived. It was a town of sea captains, and at least one of them liked his garden.

Community Noticeboard

⭐ Got Patronals photographs? Any year, any part of the week. Reply with them attached; first-name credit, as always.

⭐ Walked in the pink on Sunday? Send me the march, not anybody’s face close up.

⭐ Know where Remembrance is marked in Benidorm? See You Asked, and reply.

⭐ Still counting down? Open your countdown and share it in the Group.

⭐ Missed an issue? Every back issue is on the site, free to read, no sign-in.

This week: your photographs on the site, eighteen rice menus and the €30 question between the dearest and the cheapest, the Penyes’ day, a wet weekend, and an hour handed back. Next week: Halloween, the run-up to the Patronals, and, I hope, an answer about Remembrance from one of you.

Reply any time. I sometimes quote readers by first name in the Bulletin; just say if you would rather I did not.

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