Novelda

The Vinalopó valley has been occupied since at least the Chalcolithic period, and the route through it gave Novelda early strategic importance. After the Castilian conquest, the town passed to the Lord of Villena, the infante Manuel de Castilla, brother of Alfonso X. It shifted between the kingdoms of Murcia, Alicante, and Valencia through the mid-13th century, finally joining the Kingdom of Valencia in 1296.

In 1366, Peter IV of Aragon granted the lordship to Mateo Gornay; by 1393 it had passed to Pedro Maça de Liçana, whose family established the barony of Novelda in 1448. Subsequent owners included the Rocamora family, the Dukes of Mandás, and the Marquises of La Romana. The castle was eventually abandoned, but the town continued to grow: 230 families in 1510, rising to 2,115 inhabitants by 1595, most of them Moorish.

The expulsion of 1609 caused a severe demographic and economic collapse. Recovery came slowly into the 18th century. The abolition of the señoríos in 1837 helped consolidate a new commercial and agrarian middle class, and the town was granted city status in 1901.

The hilltop of La Mola holds the town's two most striking monuments: an Almohad-origin castle and the Sanctuary of Santa María Magdalena, a modernist work by local engineer José Sala Sala, built between 1918 and 1946 and inspired by Barcelona's Sagrada Familia. In town, several modernist buildings survive from the early 1900s, including the Casa-Museo Modernista (designed by Murcian architect Pedro Cerdán, 1900–1904), the Centro Cultural Gómez-Tortosa (1902), and Casa Mira (1908). The Arciprestal Church of San Pedro dates to 1553, later remodelled in baroque style.

Novelda sits 17 km from Alicante-Elche International Airport and 28 km from the city of Alicante. The local kitchen draws on the broader regional tradition: dishes to look for include gazpacho noveldense (broth with flatbread and rabbit), fasegures (spiced minced-meat stuffing), gachamiga (a flatbread of flour, water, oil, and garlic), rice with rabbit and snails, bollitori de bacallà (a boiled dish of potato, dried pepper, and salt cod), forment picat (cracked wheat), vegetable rice with pulses, puchero broth, and xanxullo.