Cocentaina

People have lived around Cocentaina since the Palaeolithic. Three rock shelter sites here — Alberri, la Paella and la Penya Banyà — contain schematic cave paintings, recognised in 1998 as part of the UNESCO-listed rock art of the Mediterranean basin. The area also holds significant Iberian archaeological sites, the most important being La Serreta, shared with neighbouring Alcoy and Penáguila, where finds including the Plomos de Alcoy and the Divinitat de la Serreta were made.

Under Muslim rule the town, known as Qustantaniya, was a significant economic, agricultural and administrative centre. King James I of Aragon took it in 1245, though the following decades saw major revolts led by the warlord Al-Azraq. In 1304 raiders from Granada sacked and burned the town — the origin of the local nickname "Socarrats" (the scorched ones).

The first feudal lord was the Aragonese admiral Roger de Lauria, granted the title of baron in 1291. In 1448 Alfonso V sold the town for 80,000 florins to the military commander Jimeno Pérez de Corella, who received the title of count and whose Navarrese family reshaped the Palacio Condal into its current form. By the early 19th century the town passed to the Dukes of Medinaceli, who still hold the title. The expulsion of the Moriscos in 1609 hit the economy hard, but recovery was underway by the following century. Textile industry, encouraged by neighbouring Alcoy, began to take root in the late 19th century, and the arrival of the Alcoy–Gandía railway in 1893 improved connections further.

The Palacio Condal is Cocentaina's most distinguished civil building, a Gothic-Renaissance structure built on the site of an earlier Muslim building. Roger de Lauria raised the first Gothic building on this spot in the second half of the 13th century.

Above the town, the Castillo de Cocentaina is a Gothic military fortress built in the late 13th and early 14th centuries. Its central feature is a large square tower, 13.5 metres per side and 12 metres tall, set on a dressed-stone plinth. A second castle, the Castillo de Penella, is a rural fortified manor of the early Christian period, built in rammed earth with a square keep of 4 metres per side and 12 metres in height, with battlements at the top.

The medieval Christian town was once ringed by walls with twenty-four towers and four entrance gates; much has been lost over time, but stretches survive. The Arab quarter, El Raval, retains its original street plan almost intact — narrow, winding lanes and dead-end alleys arranged around what was once a large mosque, now the Renaissance-style Church of El Salvador, built over it in the late 16th century. The Church of Santa María, founded in the 13th century, rebuilt in the 16th and again in 1666, was completed in its present form in 1780. The Edificio Merín, a rationalist building from 1930 by Alcoy architect Vicente Valls Gadea, is one of the earliest examples of that style in the Comunidad Valenciana. Outside town, the Vía Verde del Serpis follows the old Alcoy–Gandía railway line of 1892.

Autocares Travicoi runs several buses daily, including weekends, between Valencia and Alcoy. From Alcoy, Subus runs multiple daily services to Cocentaina, with separate summer and winter timetables available on their website. Both companies stop at the same point in Cocentaina.

By road, the town sits on the N-340, which connects to the A-7 between Alicante and Valencia. The town is small and easy to walk. Cocentaina and nearby Alcoy are known for café licor, a coffee liqueur dating to the early 13th century that holds the Spanish denomination of origin Bebidas Espirituosas Tradicionales.

It is drunk alone or mixed with orxata, soda water, or lemon water.