What to see in Petrer

Petrer is a village of medieval origin in the Medio Vinalopó district, 37 kilometres from Alicante, with a population of just over 34,000 spread across a large municipal area of more than 100 square kilometres. Its urban centre has merged completely with Elda's, forming a conurbation of close to 90,000 people that runs as a single city day to day, even though each municipality keeps its own town council. A medieval castle crowns the hill where the old town grew up, with houses cut straight into the rock on its slopes.

Together with Elda, Elche and Almansa, Petrer is part of Spain's largest footwear-manufacturing area, an industry that still employs a large share of the working population in the Medio Vinalopó, the district with the heaviest concentration of shoemaking anywhere in Alicante province.

A castle fought over by two crowns

The castle's origins go back to Islamic rule in the 12th and 13th centuries, when the settlement was known as Bitrir. After the Christian conquest, Petrer's Mudéjar population occupied it in 1265, until Jaime I of Aragon took it back on behalf of his son-in-law, Alfonso X of Castile. Castile and Aragon fought over the town for much of the 14th century, until the War of the Two Peters left it firmly in Aragonese hands. The Castillo de Petrer keeps a rectangular keep with two floors and a terrace, whose lower chamber served first as a cistern and later as a prison; today it hosts exhibitions and is free to visit.

Starting in 1860, the town's cave houses were dug into the castle wall and the hillside below it, simple dwellings that stayed at a stable temperature year-round and numbered more than 200 across the municipality by the mid-20th century. Most were cut in the 1950s and 1960s as second homes. Restored in 2008, the cave house built into the castle wall is the only one open to visitors today, folded into the municipal museum's route.

Museum, church and festival

The Museo Dámaso Navarro holds more than 12,000 archaeological and ethnological pieces, including a 4th-century Roman mosaic found in 1975 at the Villa Petraria; it opened in 1999 and moved into a new building in 2019, with free entry. Near the museum, the Church of San Bartolomé began construction in 1779. Every May, around the 14th, Petrer holds a Moros y Cristianos festival documented since the 17th century and officially recognised as a fiesta of tourist interest, with ten comparsas split between the two sides.

The conurbation shares much of its daily life with Elda, with which Petrer has formed a single urban area since the mid-20th century.