GlynSeptember is the month Benidorm hands itself back. The schools go in, the crowds thin out from the second week, the sea is still about as warm as it gets all year, and the Old Town stops queueing. If you have only ever come in August, this is the month that will change your mind about the place.
It is also busier in the diary than people expect. Pride takes the first week, there are two proper local fiestas, and one of the best nights of Spanish rock you will get all year lands on the last Saturday.
First, a note about the 30th of August
If you are already here as the month turns, do not sleep through the Sunday. Stage nine of the Vuelta a España starts in Villajoyosa, fifteen minutes down the coast, and it is the hardest stage of this year’s race: 187 kilometres from the seafront at La Vila to the summit of the Alto de Aitana, the mountain you have been looking at inland all holiday.
The neutralised start is at 12.26 from the beach promenade in Villajoyosa, and the leaders are expected at the top of Aitana at around ten past five. Standing on a pavement in Villajoyosa costs nothing, the tram from Benidorm takes about twenty minutes, and a Grand Tour rolling out past you is a considerably better morning than another go on the sunbeds.
Benidorm Pride
Tuesday 1 to Sunday 6 September. Parade on the Saturday. Mostly Levante and the Rincón.
The biggest thing in the September calendar by a distance, and it is honest to say straight away that it is not an Old Town event. The main stage is the Julio Iglesias auditorium in the Parque de l’Aigüera, and the parade runs along Levante with floats, sound systems and several thousand people on the seafront. The week around it is pool parties and themed nights in the venues up towards the Rincón.
What the Old Town gets is the overflow, and it is rather lovely. The bars up here fill with people who have come off the parade and want somewhere smaller to finish the evening. If you want to be part of it without standing in a crowd for four hours, that is the way to do it.
Visit Benidorm has the dates confirmed but had not published the parade route or times when we wrote this. Check the festival’s own site closer to the day rather than trusting a listings page.
The Maratón del Euro
Saturday 5 September. Organised by the Comissió de Festes Majors Patronals.
This is the one to go and find if you want to see the town being itself. It is not a race, whatever the name suggests. People lay euro coins end to end along a length of tape — forty-five coins to the metre — and the line gets longer all day as passers-by add to it. The money pays for the Festes Majors Patronals in November.
They have been doing it since 1990, when it started as the Marathon of the Twenty Duros, and it is the sort of thing that only survives in a town where enough people still know each other. Drop a couple of euros on the tape. It costs you nothing you will miss and it buys a great deal of goodwill.
Fiestas del Barrio Imalsa II
Friday 25 to Sunday 27 September. The Imalsa neighbourhood.
Three days of a proper barrio fiesta, and one of a run of neighbourhood celebrations the council lists across the year. Expect inflatables and games for the children in the afternoon, a paella, a foam party, playback competitions and music until late.
Nobody is putting this on for visitors, which is exactly why it is worth walking to. Go, eat something, do not try to organise the evening around it, and let it be what it is.
Iberia Festival
Saturday 26 September, from 6pm. Auditorio Julio Iglesias, Calle Primavera 22, in the Parque de l’Aigüera. Ticketed, over-16s.
The second of the festival’s two Benidorm dates this year, and a full evening of Spanish pop and rock in an open-air auditorium — the format Benidorm does better than anywhere on this coast. The bill announced so far takes in 091, La Frontera, Mikel Erentxun and Ringo Rango, with the organisers saying more names are still to come, so it is worth looking at the festival’s own site rather than going off this list.
If your Spanish is non-existent it does not matter in the slightest. Everybody around you will know every word and you will have a very good time regardless.
Dates the council has not pinned down yet
Three things sit on Benidorm’s own fiesta calendar for September marked pendiente, meaning the association running them has not fixed a day: the Cagà de la Burra and the Menjars de la Terra, both run by Sant Antoni, and the Festival de la Vendimia put on by the Casa de Castilla-La Mancha. All three are local, all three are worth catching, and none of them will be advertised anywhere you would think to look. Ask in the Old Town or watch the boards.
Where the entertainment actually is
The Old Town’s evenings are smaller, closer and cheaper than the strip, and in September they are at their best, because the venues have their regulars back and the staff are no longer running on fumes.
- Vincents, on Calle del Mercado — the first British bar Benidorm ever had, open since 1965, karaoke from nine every night
- Kaffe Klee, for drag cabaret in a room too small to hide at the back of. Some Old Town places shut for a break in the hottest weeks, so September is when they are reliably open again
- Bar Mal Pas, at Calle Mal Pas 1, for a jug of sangria on a terrace looking straight down at the cove
- La Cava Aragonesa, on the Plaça de la Constitució, if you want to eat your way along a counter rather than sit down to dinner
None of these publish a schedule worth relying on. The Old Town way is to walk the streets around the Plaça de la Constitució after about nine and read the boards outside. That is not us being unhelpful; it is genuinely how it works.
And if you fancy venturing into the New Town
The big production shows are down on the strip and there is no point pretending the Old Town competes on that. Make it a deliberate evening rather than a wander: pick the room, book it, get a taxi, and come back up here afterwards for a last one.
Worth knowing for October
The month turns straight into the busiest stretch of the local calendar. Moros y Cristianos runs from the 1st to the 4th of October, which is one of the genuinely spectacular things this town does and deserves its own trip. The Festes del Roser follow from the 7th to the 11th, and the Día de la Comunitat Valenciana falls on the 9th. If you are choosing between late September and early October, October wins on pageantry and September wins on peace and quiet.
Dates here come from Benidorm council’s own 2026 fiesta calendar and the organisers’ own listings, checked at the end of August. Local fiesta times move, and some had not been published at all when we wrote this — where that is the case we have said so rather than guessed. If you spot something that has changed, tell us and we will fix it.
