Casa Carbonell

Casa Carbonell stands on the Explanada de España, Alicante's best-known seafront promenade, and is one of the buildings that define that stretch of waterfront. It was designed by Alicante-born architect Juan Vidal Ramos and took most of the first half of the 1920s to complete, built on a plot that had previously held one of the city's markets. The result blends French-influenced historicism — domes and towers with a classical air — with Valencian modernist detailing, using marble in the entrance halls, sandstone at the base, and iron and glass for the canopies.

The building was commissioned by Enrique Carbonell, a textile industrialist from Alcoy who had grown wealthy during the First World War and wanted a home by the sea after doctors recommended a coastal climate for his daughter Herminia, who had a heart condition. Construction finished in 1925, though Carbonell never lived there: he died in 1924, before it was complete. The year it was inaugurated, a seaplane arriving from Algiers crashed into one of the domes, killing both people on board and knocking off the top of the affected dome.

Casa Carbonell today

The building now holds shops and offices on the ground floor and rented apartments above, and its silhouette — domes, balustrades, corner turrets — remains one of the visual landmarks of the Explanada, close to the Mercado Central and the Teatre Principal, both a short walk away. Walking the Explanada's wave-patterned pavement up to Casa Carbonell is one of the standard ways to take in Alicante's waterfront, with the harbour and Castillo de Santa Bárbara as a backdrop.