What to see in Ibi

Ibi sits in an inland valley of Alicante province, between Alcoy and Jijona, at an elevation of more than 800 metres. For much of the twentieth century it held Spain's largest concentration of toy factories, with more than seventy running at the industry's peak. That history now sits alongside a second trade, ice cream making, which took over as the main economic activity once the toy sector went into decline.

From tin toys to artisan ice cream

Ibi's toy industry began in a family tinware workshop: in 1905, Rafael Payá Picó handed the business to his three sons, Vicente, Pascual and Emilio, who turned it into Payá Hermanos, the town's first company built entirely around manufacturing metal toys. Its miniature cars, toy kitchens and table-football sets drew in more workshops, and by the mid-twentieth century Ibi formed part of what is now called the Valle del Juguete (Toy Valley) together with Onil, Castalla, Tibi and Biar, with toys accounting for close to 80% of local industrial activity. The 1970s oil crisis pushed up the price of plastic, and the later arrival of toys made in China closed much of what remained: Payá and Rico, the two biggest factories, shut down in 1984. The Museo Valenciano del Juguete, housed in the former Payá building, keeps several hundred pieces from that century of production. The town's other tradition, ice cream making, is older and still active: in the mid-nineteenth century, several Ibi residents working in Madrid learned the craft from an Italian ice cream maker and combined it with snow packed into hillside ice wells; in 1892 Carlos Bornay founded La Ibense Bornay here, Spain's oldest ice cream company, and generations of ice cream makers went out every summer to sell ice cream, horchata and lemon water across the rest of the country, an itinerant trade recalled by the Fuente del Gelador, a granite monument carved in 1991.

What to see in Ibi today

Plaza de los Reyes Magos holds the monument to the Three Wise Men that gives it its name: a white marble sculpture weighing over five tonnes, inaugurated on 5 January 1975 and made by the Granada-born sculptor Aurelio López Azaustre. Close by stands the Iglesia de la Transfiguración del Señor, a late-eighteenth-century neoclassical church topped with a dome of blue glazed tiles. On the edge of town, on the way up into the sierra, the Torretes botanical garden and biological station holds botanical collections and a medieval garden of medicinal plants, run jointly with the University of Alicante. Anyone planning a day trip from Alicante finds two trades, toys and ice cream, condensed into one walkable route through the centre.