The Benidorm Bulletin — Issue 77 | 13 – 20 September 2026

From the Editor

The town that built its reputation on the two-euro pint has spent this week making nine-euro cocktails and asking you to score them out of five on your phone. That is not a joke at Benidorm’s expense. It is genuinely on, it finishes next Sunday, eight bars are in it, and hardly a word about it has appeared in English anywhere. So it is the lead.

The rest of the week is busier than last week’s, which is not a high bar but is still a relief. The Disco Festival takes over the Bali from Wednesday, the town gives away its buses for a day, there is a bike ride out to a hermitage on Saturday and a charity 10K on Sunday morning. And somewhere in the middle of it I have a correction to make, because half of what I told Tracey last week was wrong and the wrong half was the useful half.

One favour first. If you have got a countdown running, there is a button on it I would like you to press and a picture I would like you to post. It is the next thing down the page and it takes about ten seconds.

Nine Euros, Ten Days, and the Town Quietly Showing Off

Eight bars, two cocktails each, a QR code on every table and a vote you cast from your own phone. It finishes next Sunday and you are almost certainly walking past it.

Benidorm is in the middle of its fifth cocktail competition and it runs from last Friday through to Sunday 20 September. It is part of the council’s gastronomic programme, the same run of things that gives the town the spoon fortnight in February and the tapas competition in June, and it is the one nobody tells the British about.

Here is how it works, because it is refreshingly simple. Every bar in it has invented two drinks for the occasion: one with alcohol at €9, one without at €7, the same price everywhere, no small print. You order one, you drink it, you point your phone at the QR code on the table and you give it a mark out of five. You leave a phone number and you are in a draw for one of six vouchers for free cocktails. A professional jury picks Best Cocktail 2026 and Best Non-Alcoholic Cocktail 2026. The public prize, the one you are voting for, is Most Popular.

The bars are Camarote Club Coctelería, Diva 15, Ku Lounge Café, La Pinta Beach, La Terrasse at the Port Benidorm, Malaspina, Pinocchio Playa, Shija Sabores de los Balcanes and Urban Beach. The official announcement says eight establishments and then lists nine names, which I have decided not to worry about and neither should you.

Now the bit I actually want to say. Every time this town does something like this, somebody is along within the hour to point out that nine euros is not what Benidorm is for. I think that is exactly backwards. Nine euros is what a cocktail costs anywhere that makes one properly, with fresh fruit and a person who has been taught to do it, and the remarkable thing here is not the nine euros. It is that ten minutes’ walk from a bar charging it you can still have two tapas and two drinks for five and a half.

A town with one price point is a town with one kind of visitor, and that is how resorts die. The mayor’s line, when they launched it, was that the cocktail, like Benidorm, makes the ordinary extraordinary. That is precisely the sort of thing mayors say, and on this occasion he happens to be right.

What this means for you:

• You have until Sunday. If you are here, do two of them in an evening and vote on both
• The €7 alcohol-free one is not a consolation prize. If you are driving, or not drinking, this is the one week of the year somebody has actually thought about you
• Ku Lounge is the one of the nine I know well, and it is in Where to Wet Your Whistle further down

☀️ What’s On This Week

A proper week, after a fortnight of very thin ones. There is something on every day from Wednesday, and three of them are free.

The whole month, rather than a week of it, lives on the What’s On page. I add to that one as things are announced instead of writing it once at the start of the month and abandoning it, which is why it is worth a look before you book and again the week before you fly.

And the markets, as ever. The big municipal one is Wednesday morning at the Foietes car park by the Guillermo Amor sports city, number 1 bus. Rincón de Loix runs Wednesday and Sunday, number 6. Both pack up at half past one and both are better before ten. Every market for miles is on one page here.

Coming Up: Car Free Day on Tuesday 22nd, with the Poniente road shut for eleven hours (Hot Topic, below). Then the Fiestas del Barrio Imalsa II on the 25th to 27th, the Iberia Festival at the Julio Iglesias auditorium on Saturday 26th, and the rice fortnight, Arroces de la Terra, from 16 to 25 October. And then October opens with the big one: Moros y Cristianos, Thursday 1 to Sunday 4. The whole fiesta year sits on the festivals hub and the dated version is on the fiesta calendar.

🍺 Where to Wet Your Whistle

Three this week, and they are deliberately the argument in the lead story. A nine-euro cocktail on the promenade, two tapas and two drinks for five and a half in the Old Town, and a full English in between. All three are within a walk of each other and all three are mine rather than an aggregator’s.

The cocktail: Ku Lounge Café, Avinguda Alcoi, on the Levante promenade. It is one of the eight in the competition this week, which is the reason it is here, but it would have earned a slot anyway. It is not the Old Town and it does not pretend to be. It is a broad shaded terrace on the front with wicker seating rather than the stacking plastic you get twenty yards either side, a resident DJ who plays without making conversation impossible, and the sea in front of you.

It is my own default. When I have got an afternoon and nothing to do with it, that is where I end up, and this week it has a nine-euro competition cocktail and a seven-euro alcohol-free one with a QR code next to them. My write-up is here. Worth knowing that the Ku name also belongs to a nightclub that holds five thousand people, which is a very different evening.

The plate: La Tapita, in the Tapas Circle behind Calle Doctor Pérez Llorca. You get in down the side of Abuela Herminia and it is a horseshoe of old Spanish bars that most people walk past the entrance to without noticing there is anything down there. I have been going for twenty-odd years. It has changed hands and had a tidy-up and the essence of it has not shifted an inch.

The menu is in Spanish and only Spanish. Boquerones, meatballs, gambas al ajillo, croquettes, glass counters, hams hanging up, and the sort of decor that has accumulated rather than been chosen. Raciones start around €7.50, beers from €2.70, and two tapas and two drinks came to €5.50 on a recent visit. It opens in the evening from about seven, it is full between eight and nine, and you will queue. Go at half seven. The full review is here, and if you would rather work the whole run than sit down in one place, the Old Town tapas guide is the one to take with you.

The one in between: the Halfway House, in the middle of Food Street, right on the edge of the Old Town. I am putting it in precisely because it is the opposite of the other two, and because the pretence that nobody on this list ever eats a full English is silly.

Breakfasts, fish and chips, chicken and chips, cheap, and the food comes fresh and hot rather than out of a warming tray. Portions are sensible rather than enormous, which some people will count against it and I do not. The staff have a laugh with each other and with you and still get the plates out. Its great virtue is that it is honest: it does one thing, it does it well, and it is not trying to be anything else. It is also on the Old Town side, so you get there without walking the length of the strip. My write-up is here.

🎭 Tonight’s Entertainment

Before the listings, something I noticed going through this week’s and which nobody ever explains to a first-timer. It is not eleven venues with eleven line-ups. It is a circuit.

Aisha Nicole’s Adele is at Rockerfellas on Sunday, the Tropical Bar on Tuesday, the Explorers Club on Wednesday and Philippines 10 in between. Max Fisher’s Elvis does Rockerfellas, then Sinatras, then the Explorers Club. Status Quo is at the Rock & Roll House most nights of the week and Mick the Flute is at the Western Saloon at half seven more or less permanently. The same forty or so performers move round the same rooms, night after night, all season.

That is not a complaint, and it is certainly not a scandal. It is simply how a town with this many stages and this many acts has to work, and once you understand it the whole thing gets easier: the act you missed on Sunday is somewhere else on Tuesday. Stop chasing a venue and start chasing a name. Ask the act where they are tomorrow. They will tell you, because they would rather you came.

The bigger piece of work underneath all of this is on the site: I have gone through every live-music venue in the Old Town, room by room and night by night, with who is resident and when. Nobody else has that written down in English and it took a long time, so please use it.

Four rooms this week that this newsletter has not sent you to. The Morgan Tavern has the broadest week of anywhere: Michael Jackson and Liam Gallagher on Sunday, Wham and George Michael on Tuesday, Maroon 5, a Beatles tribute on Thursday and Ed Sheeran against George Ezra, plus Kelly Griggs and Maria G singing under their own names and Cris Cabeytu doing a Benidorm-only hits set. Philippines 10 is the one for the older ear: Neil Diamond, Michael Bublé, Take That, Coldplay, a West End musicals night and Leroy Smokes on the soul.

The Rock & Roll House is the one I would pick if you only do one. It is not chasing this year’s charts: Status Quo most nights, Dalton on the fifties and sixties, Chunky B, and a room that knows exactly what it is. And the Western Saloon is the oddity of the week, in that it starts early. Mick the Flute at half past seven, Rob Richards, Maria G, Liam Gallagher on Sunday at six. If you want live music and to be in bed at a reasonable hour, that is your venue and there is no other answer.

The usual caveat, and it has never once been wrong. Nothing at all is filed for Friday or Saturday, which tells you how busy the bars are rather than how quiet. Treat any printed start time as a rough guide. The chalkboard outside is always right and the internet frequently is not.

☀️ Weather Watch — Mid September

The step down has happened. A week ago the afternoons were touching thirty-one; this week they sit around twenty-six and twenty-seven, which is the temperature people say they want and then fail to book. Dry all week, with the possibility of a few spots on Thursday that will not trouble anybody. Nights are noticeably softer than a fortnight ago, and by the small hours you will want something over your shoulders walking home.

What to pack: summer clothes and one long-sleeved thing, exactly as last week, and this week you will actually put the long-sleeved thing on. The sea is still around twenty-six degrees and will be warmer than the air at breakfast time, which is the annual curiosity of this fortnight. It stays swimmable well into October. If you can face being up for it, the hour before nine on Poniente is the best hour of the day and you will have most of it to yourself.

❓ You Asked…

Q: We’re at the Bali that week. Is the Disco Festival included, or is it only for people who booked the package?

Neither, quite. It is a festival being held at the hotel rather than a hotel putting on entertainment, so staying there gets you a very short walk and nothing else. Tickets come in three shapes: a single night, a four-night evening pass, and a full wristband that covers the daytime things as well as the nights. The daytime is the part people underestimate, because the pool parties, the beach brunch and the dance sessions are where a four-day ticket earns its money. I am not going to quote you a price, because nothing published is stable enough to trust and I would rather say nothing than have you turn up with the wrong number in your head. Buy it from the festival’s own channel, not from a third party, and buy the daytime if you are there all four days.

Q: Are the free buses on Wednesday really free for everyone, or do we need a resident card?

The honest answer is that the announcement does not say, and I have looked at it properly. What has been published is that the council and the bus operator have agreed free transfers on the urban lines for Public Transport Day. What has not been published is whether that means everybody, or what a passenger has to do to get it. So enjoy it if it happens and do not plan a day around it. The far more useful thing, which is true every day of the year and which almost no visitor knows, is that the town buses already give you a free transfer within ninety minutes of your first journey. Two buses, one fare. It does not apply on lines 21, 22 and 23. That, and the fact that a bus card is bought from the driver but a tram card is bought at the station window and the two do not talk to each other, is all in what buses, trams and taxis actually cost here.

🔥 Hot Topic

Shut the Road and See What Happens

On Tuesday week, for eleven hours, Benidorm is going to take the traffic off the road that runs behind Poniente beach. Avenida de la Armada Española, eleven in the morning until ten at night, access for buses and for people who live there and nobody else. Round the corner on Calle Alcalde José Such Ortega they will put bouncy castles in the road for three hours.

And I will tell you exactly what will happen, because it happens every year. It will be lovely. Everybody who wanders down there will remark on how pleasant it is without the cars. Somebody from the council will say something about a greener Benidorm. And on Wednesday morning the traffic will come back and nobody will mention it again for twelve months.

Which strikes me as a waste of a decent idea. This is a town where three quarters of all journeys are already made on foot, which is the single most underrated fact about the place. There is fifty million euros of regional money and an international design competition circling the question of what the seafront should be. Everybody is asking architects. Meanwhile the town has, once a year, an entirely free and completely reversible way of finding out: shut it for a fortnight in the middle of October, when the pavements are quiet and the mistake would be cheap, and count what happens.

The case against is not stupid and I am not going to pretend it is. People live behind that road and some of them are not twenty-five. The lorries that keep every one of those bars stocked do not run on good intentions, and a promenade you cannot deliver to is a promenade with nothing on it to eat. Poniente is also the resident end of town rather than the visitor end, so the people inconvenienced are the ones who were here in February.

But a single symbolic Tuesday answers nothing, and that is my objection. Either the road matters, in which case say so and stop closing it for the photograph, or it does not, in which case find out properly. I know which way I would bet. What I do not know is what the woman on the fourth floor with the shopping thinks, and she is the one whose answer counts.

💡 Tip of the Week

The Free Week Nobody Advertises to You

European Mobility Week runs here from Wednesday 16th to Tuesday 22nd, in fourteen hundred-odd towns across Europe at the same time. Most of it is aimed at schoolchildren and is of no use to you whatsoever. Four bits are, and they are not signposted in English anywhere, so here they are in order.

Wednesday 16th. Free transfers on the town buses, all day, agreed with the operator. See the second question above for what is and is not known about it.

Thursday 17th, and this is the one that lasts. The town is putting in bicycle self-repair stations around Benidorm: a stand, the tools on a cable, a pump. They are being unveiled that day and then they simply stay there, which makes this the only item in the whole week that is still useful in November. If you hire bikes here, or if you are one of the growing number who bring their own, find out where your nearest is. There is also a free basic-mechanics session at the Parque de Elche in the afternoon run by the Biciclub, and discounted rates on the town’s public car parks that day.

Friday 18th. A bicycle exchange in the afternoon at the Plaza de Sus Majestades los Reyes: bring one you no longer ride, swap it for one you will. Genuinely charming, and not the sort of thing a resort is supposed to bother with.

Tuesday 22nd, if you have a car. Car Free Day. Avenida de la Armada Española behind Poniente is restricted from eleven in the morning to ten at night, and Calle Alcalde José Such Ortega is closed altogether from five until eight in the evening. If you are driving a hire car and your apartment is down that end, work it out on the Monday rather than at half past eleven on the Tuesday with the boot full of shopping.

🤔 Did You Know?

Out in the water at the Rincón end of Levante there is a rectangle marked out with four towers and a cable strung between them. Most people who notice it assume it is something to do with the boats. It is a water-ski circuit, it has been there since 1966, and when it was built it was the first cable ski in the world set in open sea.

A man called Humberto Armas put it there. The principle is that the cable pulls you rather than a boat, so there is no engine, no wash and no wake, and a dozen people can be going round at once at anything from twenty-seven to fifty-eight kilometres an hour inside a perimeter of a thousand square metres. Everywhere else in the world that does this does it on a lake, for the obvious reason that lakes stay still. Benidorm did it in the Mediterranean, sixty years ago, and it is still running.

This is the town people call a concrete joke. In 1966, before most of the hotels that get photographed for the joke had been built, somebody here looked at an empty bay and decided the sensible thing to do with it was invent a way of water-skiing without a boat. You have almost certainly walked past it with a coffee and never once wondered what it was.

Community Noticeboard

⭐ Post your countdown in the group — open it, press Share this, post the picture. Open your countdown.

⭐ Vote before Sunday — the cocktail competition closes on the 20th. Scan the code on the table, one to five stars, and you are in the draw.

⭐ Still after two photographs — the Three Kings cabalgata on 5 January and the Patronals in November. Both pages are written and both are bare. Reply and attach one off your phone and I will credit you by first name.

⭐ The fiesta year in your pocket — every fiesta, when it falls and what happens at it, on the fiesta calendar, and you can drop the ones you care about straight into your phone at benidormoldtown.co.uk/fiestas.

⭐ Coming out with a wheelchair or a scooter? — the accessible Benidorm page is up, with what works, what does not and what it costs. Tell me where I have got it wrong.

⭐ Missed an issue? — the back numbers are all on the site, free to read, no sign-in.

A nine-euro cocktail with a QR code next to it, a tapas bar down the side of a restaurant where two of you eat and drink for five and a half, a free bus day nobody can quite explain, and a water-ski circuit that has been sitting in the bay since 1966 while everybody walked past it. Next week: Car Free Day, the rice fortnight coming into view, and the last quiet fortnight before the Moors and Christians take the town.

Thanks for reading. Pass it on to anyone with Benidorm on their mind. And if you are one of the 208 with a countdown running: open it, press Share this, post the picture in the group. That is the whole favour, and I would rather see fifty numbers on that wall this week than anything else.

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

— The Benidorm Bulletin Team