El Campello: the Illeta, the tower and a working shore
El Campello runs for about twenty kilometres along the coast north east of Alicante, between the sea and the low Sierra Grossa. For a long time it was the fishing and market outlet for the inland huerta villages, its shore too exposed to corsair raids for a permanent town, and it became a municipality in its own right only in 1901, separating from Alicante. Its centre is a working fishing port with a sixteenth-century watchtower beside it and, on a small promontory, one of the most important archaeological sites on this coast.
La Illeta dels Banyets
The Illeta dels Banyets is a low rocky spur, once almost an island, jutting into the sea by the port. People occupied it from the end of the third millennium BC, and it holds remains from the Bronze Age, an Iberian town of the fifth to third centuries BC and a Roman villa. The Iberian level is the richest: a planned settlement with what appear to be temples, storerooms, an oil or wine press and installations for salting fish, showing a community trading across the western Mediterranean. In the Roman period rectangular tanks were cut into the rock at the water's edge and linked to the sea. They were long taken for baths, which gave the site its name, the little baths, but they are now understood as fish farms.
The spur stopped being an island in 1943, when an isthmus was blasted through to connect it to the shore and part of the site was destroyed. What survives is managed as an outstation of the Archaeological Museum of Alicante and can be visited on foot from the port.
The tower and the port
Facing the Illeta stands the Torre de la Illeta, also called the Torre Vigía, built in the middle of the sixteenth century to warn the coast of raids from North African corsairs. It is one of a chain of towers along this shore, together with the Torre Bombarda inland, and the reason a settlement could hold here at all. Preserving fish is one of the oldest activities on the site, from the Roman salting tanks on the Illeta to the modern port, where the fleet still lands its catch and the afternoon auction at the lonja, with the day's fish sold by falling price, is open to the public.
A long thin town
El Campello's shape is set by the coast road and the tram line from Alicante, which run the length of the municipality and string together a series of beaches, coves and residential districts, from the wide beach by the port to the rocky inlets north towards Villajoyosa. The main town clusters around the port and the old fishermen's quarter. Inland, the ground rises quickly towards Bonalba and the boundary with Muchamiel, and the older economy of almonds and carobs is still visible on the dry terraces. Bronze Age remains at the Coveta Fumà show how long this stretch of coast has been lived on.
Visiting
The Illeta, the tower and the fish auction can be seen together in an afternoon near the port, and the tram from Alicante and Benidorm stops close by. The huerta villages behind the coast are covered in the guides to Muchamiel and San Juan de Alicante, and the city itself in the reviewed guide to Alicante.
Sources and review
Reviewed in September 2026 using the MARQ Archaeological Museum of Alicante and Ayuntamiento de El Campello heritage pages for the sequence of occupation at the Illeta dels Banyets, the Iberian settlement, the Roman fish tanks and the 1943 isthmus, Generalitat Valenciana and municipal heritage registers for the mid sixteenth-century Torre de la Illeta and the corsair-defence tower chain, and municipal and regional material for El Campello's separation from Alicante in 1901 and for its fishing port and auction. Museum and site opening arrangements and auction times change, so confirm them with the responsible institution before visiting.