Facing the beach, the popular Raval Roig neighborhood still maintains a certain seafaring air. You have to pay close attention, because in this deep corner of Alicante there is no fishing anymore except for the occasional untimely crook, but there was a time when it was inhabited by fishermen who, every morning, got up early to earn their daily wages.
A long time ago, when the old walls that protected the old town were still standing, to get to their boats they had to walk to the Puerta del Mar -that's why the square is called that- which meant taking a detour. Until a small door was opened, a small shutter, a "postiguet", which allowed them direct access to the coast. Hence the name, as we learned from the illustrious historian Joaquín Santo Matas, who left us just a few months ago.
It was not yet a time for recreational bathing, one did not go to the sea to have a good time. That would come later, with the aristocratic fashion of wave baths.
The French Biarritz and the Cantabrian Sardinero boast of having started the custom in the mid-19th century. Although in Alicante there is evidence that El Postiguet already attracted enough bathers for the mayor of the time, Miguel Pascual de Bonanza, to issue a proclamation on July 3, 1847 that specified in which areas of the beach men could bathe, different in any case from those reserved for women. All of them had to enter the waters of the Mediterranean "decently covered", at the risk of facing fines ranging between 10 and 30 reales.
Then the train would arrive, the first to link Madrid with a coastal city, inaugurated on May 25, 1858 by Isabel II. You have to situate yourself in a time when travelers seeking the coolness of the Cantabrian Sea had to travel by diligence; No matter how long the railway took (19 hours on its first trip, according to the chronicles), it must be considered that a fast stagecoach needed three days to get from the capital of Spain to the north; what a difference
Then came the years of the 'train-botijo', that initiative that captured an incipient popular tourism in Madrid that between 1893 and 1917 allowed the great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers of those who today disembark from the AVE to appreciate the intoxicating Mediterranean aroma and the warm embrace of some waves that reminisce in the long days of the cold plateau winter. This is where the nickname "Madrid beach" comes from, which does not arise to express a desire for possession, as some deplore, but as a formulation of the frustrated desire every year to send everything to hell and stay forever in Alicante.
In all this transit to the current sandy area crowded with families of a lifetime who are surprised by the abundant presence of young Nordic air bienberos, the beach went through the photogenic era of spas, fashionable in the happy 20s thanks to the medicine of the time , who recommended seawater and algae baths to treat arthritis, in bathtubs where the liquid element was heated.
The blindness of the bombardments that caused so much destruction in the city during the war ended the majority; only two remained standing, named Alhambra and Alianza. That remained up until 1969, when they were demolished during an urban reform that, among other aberrations typical of the time, multiplied the lanes of the adjacent road, a surrender to road traffic whose price we are now paying.
In that year, construction also began on the architectural monstrosity that is now occupied by the Meliá and Porta Maris hotels, one of the various urban atrocities that Alicante suffered in the landista outbreak of tourism. The tremendous building splits the coastline in two, forever divorcing the beach from the port. And although the courts declared the wreckage illegal years later and the decision was made to tear it down, it remained there for the remains, ugly as the first day, but legalized and turned into a first-rate tourist reference, a nest of furtive and shady love affairs. conspiracies.
Today, 176 years after that faction that regulated the bathroom in El Postiguet, the tram has returned to the vicinity of the beach and in the nearby Puerta del Mar -where none of those present remember having ever seen a door-, the drivers suffer uninformed, forced to turn around because the passage to vehicles is interrupted by some controversial works. When returning to their towels, before the police surveillance that seeks to scare away carelessness, tourists comment on how hot the water is this year.
