What to see in Callosa d'en Sarrià

Callosa d'en Sarrià sits on a plain watered by the Algar and Guadalest rivers, closed in by the Aitana, Bernia and Aixortà mountain ranges, about ten kilometres from the Marina Baixa coast. Its population of just over 8,000 depends heavily on growing loquats, the fruit that has made the town's name known well beyond Alicante, though Callosa's origins go back much further than that crop: it began as an Arab farmstead and still carries, in its own name, the trace of the feudal lords who ruled it after the Christian conquest.

From Arab farmstead to loquat country

After Jaume I's thirteenth-century conquest, the admiral Bernat de Sarrià acquired the lordship in 1290, and his surname has stayed attached to the town's name ever since. Other noble houses followed, among them the Corona de Aragón, Bou and Moncada families and the Count of Orgaz, who held the lordship until the eighteenth century. The Iglesia Arciprestal de San Juan Bautista, built in 1578 and remodelled in 1765 by the architect Antoni Gilabert Fornés, still holds a baroque organ from 1754 and is the most important religious building in the town centre. The loquat arrived much later: it was introduced in the nineteenth century by the local grower Juan Bautista Berenguer y Ronda, and the first cooperatives to sell the fruit formed after the Spanish Civil War, with the local agricultural cooperative founded in 1958. Since 1992 Callosa's loquats have carried a Denominación de Origen Protegida, a designation that covers nineteen municipalities across the Marina Baixa and Camp d'Alacant and under which the town accounts for roughly half of all Spanish production, most of it exported to France and Italy.

The Fuentes del Algar and the rest of the town

Three kilometres from the centre, the Fuentes del Algar form a protected wetland where water from an aquifer in the Bernia and El Ferrer mountains drops through waterfalls and natural pools along a walkway a little over a kilometre long, fitted with boardwalks and viewing points. That same watercourse, the Río Algar, rises further up near Tàrbena and takes in the Guadalest, its main tributary, before reaching the Mediterranean at Altea. In the town centre, the Museo Etnológico y Arqueológico holds objects donated by residents, recreates an old village schoolroom and documents the area's traditional trades. Anyone planning a full day out can pair Callosa with Guadalest, about twelve kilometres up the CV-70, in the same river valley.