La Illeta dels Banyets

La Illeta dels Banyets occupies a small rocky peninsula in El Campello and holds more than five thousand years of continuous occupation, from the Bronze Age to the Arab period. It is one of the most complete archaeological sites in the western Mediterranean for the number of cultures that left a mark on such a small area.

Five thousand years on one peninsula

The oldest remains, from the Argaric Bronze Age (roughly 2200 to 1500 BC), include large cisterns cut into the rock to store water and burials with grave goods next to the dwellings. Between the 5th and 3rd centuries BC the site became an Iberian trading centre, with warehouses, pottery kilns and houses built around the exchange of oil and ceramics. The Roman occupation added the structures that give the site its name: the “banyets,” a series of pools cut into the rock linked to a fish-salting industry, rather than the thermal baths the popular name suggests.

The settlement stayed active through the Roman imperial period and into the Arab era, with abandonment placed around the 11th century. It stopped being a true island in 1944, when an artificial isthmus — which damaged part of the site — connected it to the mainland; since 2006 there have been plans to restore its island setting with a wooden walkway to replace the current causeway.

The visit is free and done on foot, outdoors, in a short walk that can be completed in under an hour: one more of the province’s free things to do. It combines well with the nearby Torre Vigía de la Illeta, on the same headland, a walk to Muchavista beach, or Villajoyosa’s Torre de Sant Josep, a Roman funerary monument of a similar period.