What to see in Biar

Biar is an inland village in the Alto Vinalopó district, ringed by mountains over 1,000 metres high and watched over by a castle that crowns the hill above the town. Home to just over 3,600 people, it keeps a tangle of cobbled streets, stone arches and stretches of the old defensive wall that spiral up from the main square toward the fortress. In 2025 Biar won the Pueblo Turístico del Año (Tourist Town of the Year) award, given by the Alicante newspaper Club Información to rural municipalities recognised for their work against depopulation.

The local economy pairs farming with an older industrial streak: Biar is one of the biggest olive oil producers in the province, with thousands of hectares of groves across its large municipal area, and it still keeps up traditional crafts such as pottery.

From border fortress to royal town

The castle of Biar was built in the mid-12th century on a hilltop at 750 metres to guard the frontier of Muslim territory against the Christian advance. The 1179 Treaty of Cazorla had already set the boundary between Aragon and Castile at Biar's mountain pass, and the 1244 Treaty of Almizra confirmed the split: Villena went to Castile and Biar to Aragon. King Jaime I laid siege to the castle for five months before it surrendered, an episode local historians treat as the closing chapter of the Christian conquest in the south of what is now the Comunitat Valenciana.

After the conquest, Biar became a royal town with a vote in the regional parliament in 1287, and it found itself back on the front line during the wars between Castile and Aragon in the 14th and 15th centuries. Its keep, square in plan and 19 metres tall, holds a rare Almohad-era vault thought to be among the oldest of its kind, and the whole complex was declared a historic-artistic monument in 1931. Since late 2024 it has been open with a new museum route through several rooms inside.

What to see in town

The old quarter is built around the Church of Nuestra Señora de la Asunción, raised between the 15th and 16th centuries and extended in the 17th with the Communion Chapel. On the edge of town, the Sanctuary of Nuestra Señora de Gracia has occupied its own hill since the 14th century and shows off a rococo facade finished in 1770; the town's patron saint has been venerated there since 1635. Along the bed of the Rambla de los Molinos stands the medieval aqueduct, a Gothic structure of pointed arches built to cross the ravine and carry irrigation water to the far bank.

Eight kilometres away sits Villena, the head town of the Alto Vinalopó district that Biar belongs to, which shared the border between the two medieval kingdoms with Biar for centuries.