Torrevieja: a pink lagoon, a salt town and 20 km of coast
Walk out to the edge of the Torrevieja lagoon and the water is pink. In the hottest months it can turn a vivid pink, while La Mata, the lagoon beside it, usually stays green. A narrow strip of land called El Chaparral separates the two, and a canal joins them. The colour comes from bacteria that live in very salty water and release a pigment, and the brine shrimp Artemia salina lives here too, with flamingos among the birds. Salt is why the town exists. The pans predate the 13th century and were once a royal possession, and until 1802 the site had only an old guard tower and the houses of salt workers.
Torrevieja is a seaside city on the Costa Blanca, in Alicante province, with 98,533 inhabitants (INE, 2025). In 1803 Charles IV moved salt production and administration here from La Mata. An earthquake destroyed the town in 1829 and it was rebuilt, and Alfonso XIII made it a city in 1931. In the middle of the 19th century the salt went out mainly on Swedish and Dutch ships. The Nordic link is still there. At the start of 2025 the town's own register, which counts more people than INE, listed 1,840 Swedes, 708 Norwegians and 638 Finns, and 4,708 British. More than half of the 106,350 people on it were of foreign origin.
The centre is small and easy to walk. Begin on the Paseo Marítimo Juan Aparicio, remodelled in 1999 by the architect Carme Pinós, which runs from the Dique de Levante to Playa del Cura. Spend the middle of the day on a beach: La Mata is the longest in the municipality, and our map data also names Playa del Acequión, Playa de Los Náufragos and Playa de Los Locos. Towards evening, walk out along the Dique de Levante, a breakwater 1,600 m long whose promenade opened on 7 December 2000.
Torrevieja suits you if you want a long coast within reach of the airport. The municipality has about 20 km of coastline, our map data counts 43 beaches within 15 km, and Alicante airport is about 46 km by road (est.), with direct routes from Stockholm, Gothenburg, Copenhagen, Oslo and Helsinki in every month of 2024. Think twice if you came for the pink lake as a place to swim: swimming is prohibited in both lagoons. Think twice if walking matters: five routes lie within 25 km and none is rated easy. Think twice about a winter swim, with the sea at about 14.8 degrees in February (est.). And if crowds worry you, we cannot help: INE publishes no hotel occupancy for Torrevieja.
This is a dry coast. Rain adds up to about 271 mm a year at the nearest AEMET station, Rojales, 12 km away (normals 1991–2020). September is the wettest month at 52 mm, November gets 37 and January 23, while July gets 1 mm and June and August 12 each. July has 11.1 hours of sun a day and December 5.5. At Rojales the average high is 16.9 degrees in January, 28.0 in June and 31.0 in August. The sea is at about 25.8 degrees in July and September and 27.2 in August (est.), so September gives you summer water with the first autumn rain.
