Teulada

People have lived in and around Teulada for an extraordinarily long time. The oldest evidence is the Cova de la Cendra, a cave site on the slopes of Cap d'Or whose stratified deposits reach back to the Upper Palaeolithic, somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 years ago — making it one of the oldest archaeological sites on the entire Mediterranean. Bronze Age sites are scattered across the municipality at places including Morro del Castellar, Tossal de la Font Santa, and Punta de Moraira. The Iberians left ceramic remains and traces of settlements, and the Roman period brought a notable increase in occupation: the area, close to the Roman town of Dianium, filled with rural villas devoted to farming.

When Christian forces arrived in the mid-13th century, Teulada was an Andalusian farming hamlet and Moraira a natural harbour. Incorporated into the Crown of Aragon, the town received its first significant wave of Christian settlers — around a hundred people — between 1270 and 1280, with a formal charter granted in 1277. By 1386 Teulada had secured its own independent municipal boundary, separate from Benisa and Calpe, with a population of around 300. After the last Count of Denia died, the town passed to the Crown and spent roughly half a century as a Royal Town before coming under the Palafox family, Marquesses of Ariza, who held lordship until the feudal system was abolished in the mid-19th century.

The early 20th century brought hardship. The local economy had rested on raisins and Muscat wine, and the phylloxera epidemic devastated the vineyards. Many residents emigrated to North Africa or the Americas, and the population did not recover until the 1960s. The real turning point came in the 1970s and 80s, when tourism transformed Moraira from a fishing village into a major international resort. Today, second-home tourism is the main driver of the local economy.

Teulada's most prominent building is the church of Santa Catalina, whose construction began in the final third of the 16th century, replacing an earlier Gothic church built between the late 15th and early 16th centuries. It was designed with two purposes: religious worship and defence against the Barbary pirate raids that repeatedly struck the villages of the Valencian coast. The building divides clearly into two architectural phases — the original 16th-century structure and a series of later additions running through to the present day.

The Sala de Jurados y Justicias, the old civic hall, dates from the second decade of the 17th century, with the year 1620 visible on the cornice of the main façade. Built in local stone with a rectangular plan and a single nave, its south-facing front is symmetrically composed: a central balcony, two rectangular windows, and three basket-arch openings at ground level. The covered portico once served as a trading exchange.

Down at the coast, the Castillo de Moraira stands on a rocky outcrop above the beach of l'Ampolla, commanding the whole bay. Long believed to be 16th-century work by the engineer Juan Bautista Antonelli, it is now known to be an 18th-century construction; the royal coat of arms of the Bourbon dynasty above the entrance is dated 1742. The fort has an ox-hoof ground plan with a semicircular south-facing wall, walls ten metres high built in rubble masonry faced with local stone, and seven cannon openings along the parapet.

On the headland of Cap d'Or stands the Torre de Capd'Or, a watchtower that does trace back to Antonelli: it was built following his 1563 report to Philip II recommending a chain of coastal defences. Circular in plan with a perimeter of 26 metres and walls 11 metres high, it is entirely solid from the ground up to more than halfway — there is no door at ground level, which was itself a defence measure.

The Ermita de San Vicente Ferrer, built from 1767 onwards, is a rectangular chapel with dressed sandstone corners. Its main altar holds a painting of Saint Vincent on panel, long attributed by local tradition to Juan de Juanes, though this has not been confirmed; scholars consider it to belong to the 15th-century school of Valencian primitives.