History & culture: how Xàbia became Jávea

A town in layers

Jávea rewards the historically curious because its layers are still visible in the ground. Iberian peoples settled the slopes of the Montgó long before Rome arrived; the mountain's caves and terraces have yielded finds going back further still, including a celebrated Iberian gold treasure unearthed near the town in the early twentieth century. The Romans worked the bay — fish-salting, anchorage, trade — and left their debris along the coast at the port and Punta de l'Arenal. Then came the long Islamic centuries that shaped the terraced landscape and the water channels, before the Christian conquest folded Xàbia into the new Kingdom of Valencia. Every era chose the same sheltered bay. It remains good judgement.

The walled town and its golden stone

The old town's colour scheme is geology. Tosca — the soft, honey-coloured fossil sandstone quarried locally, most famously from the coast around the Punta de l'Arenal — was cut into blocks and became lintels, arches, window surrounds and whole façades. Medieval Xàbia was a walled town, built compact and defensible a prudent two kilometres back from a pirate-troubled sea; the walls are mostly gone, demolished in the nineteenth century as the town outgrew its fear, but the street plan still traces them and the tosca detailing survives on every corner. Walk Carrer Major slowly and you are reading five centuries of the same golden stone.

San Bartolomé: a church built to fight

The parish church of San Bartolomé is the old town's anchor and its bluntest history lesson. Built and rebuilt between roughly the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries in Valencian Gothic style, it is a fortress that happens to hold services: buttresses like ramparts, arrow-slit austerity, and battlements from which the town could be defended when Barbary corsairs raided the coast. Villagers genuinely sheltered inside it. It is a national monument, and the square around it — town hall, covered market, café tables — is still where Xàbia keeps its civic heart.

The raisin boom and the riu-raus

Jávea's great commercial adventure was dried grapes. Through the nineteenth century the Marina Alta turned muscatel grapes into raisins and shipped them from this coast to Britain and beyond in remarkable quantities — for a few decades the trade made local fortunes, built the town's handsome bourgeois houses, and financed the port. Its architectural signature is the riu-rau: the arcaded drying porch, with its run of rounded arches, where grapes dried on racks and could be rushed under cover when rain threatened. When blight and competition killed the trade around the turn of the twentieth century, the riu-raus stayed — and are now the region's most quietly loved vernacular buildings, restored as homes, museums and wedding backdrops.

The arches of a riu-rau are the Marina Alta's signature written in lime and stone.

The Soler Blasco museum

For a small town, Jávea's municipal museum earns its visit. The Museu Arqueològic i Etnogràfic Soler Blasco occupies a seventeenth-century mansion in the old town — the Palau d'Antoni Banyuls — and walks you from the Montgó's prehistoric finds through Iberian and Roman Xàbia to the ethnographic recent past of fishing gear and farm tools. Its star turn is Iberian gold: the museum displays the town's famous treasure finds (with reproductions standing in where originals live in national collections — ask). Entry has traditionally been free or nominal; check current hours with the town hall.

Xàbia: language and identity

The town's own name is the first culture lesson: Xàbia in Valencian, Jávea in Castilian, both official, both correct. Valencian — the local variety of the Catalan language family — is the historic tongue of the Marina Alta, taught in schools, spoken at home and printed on every street sign. The fiestas carry the identity: Sant Joan's bonfires in June, the Moors and Christians in July, Loreto's port fiesta in late summer, and a calendar of processions that predates tourism by centuries. You do not need Valencian to live here, but learning to say bon dia in it is noticed, and appreciated.

Nets, easels and the culture of now

While the old town farmed and dried raisins, the shore fished — and still does. The port district, Aduanas del Mar, grew from a fishermen's quarter into a working harbour where the fleet lands its catch and the afternoon fish auction feeds the coast's restaurants; its church, Nuestra Señora de Loreto, is startling 1960s modernism with a roof built like a ship's hull. Around that living heritage, Jávea wears its culture lightly but constantly: independent galleries and artists' studios in the old town — the light that drew painters here never left — plus exhibitions, concerts and a summer programme from the municipal cultural centre, and international choirs and art societies layered over the Valencian base. It is the culture of a town that has drawn creative refugees for a century.