Peñíscola

The rocky headland has been settled since the Iberians, and its name descends from the Latin peninsula. Phoenicians, Greeks and Carthaginians all held it in turn — local legend makes it the place where Hamilcar Barca had his son Hannibal swear never to be a friend of Rome — and Arab geographers later described Banáskula as an impregnable castle by the sea, with farms, plentiful water and salt pans. In 1251 James I of Aragon granted the town a charter under the laws of Valencia and handed Muslim property to Christian settlers.

The Knights Templar built the present castle between 1294 and 1307; after the order was suppressed, the Knights of Montesa held it. Its great moment came during the Western Schism. Pedro Martínez de Luna, the Avignon pope Benedict XIII, known as Papa Luna, withdrew here in the 1410s after losing support elsewhere, made the castle a papal palace and library, and stayed until his death in 1423; his successor, Clement VIII, was the second pope of Peñíscola.

Philip II had new walls built between 1576 and 1578 to designs by Giovanni Battista Antonelli. The town gained the title of city in 1707, and in February 1812 Napoleon's general Suchet captured it and expelled its people to the Serra d'Irta. A proper fishing port was finally finished in 1922. After the Civil War, which did great damage here, tourism grew, given a decisive push by two films shot in the town: Berlanga's comedy Calabuch in 1956 and Anthony Mann's El Cid, for which the castle was restored and new walls added.

Peñíscola calls itself the City in the Sea, and its identity is bound up with the rock, the castle and the figure of Papa Luna, whose name is attached to the castle, the main seafront avenue and the sea gate he built in 1414. Valencian and Spanish are both in everyday use, and the town's official name is given in both languages.

The film industry has long found its way here. El Cid used the town and castle to stand in for medieval Valencia, and more recently scenes of the series Game of Thrones and of the Spanish series El Ministerio del Tiempo were filmed at the castle and on the Irta coast. Summer brings a busy cultural calendar: a classical theatre festival at the castle in July and August, an international jazz festival in July, and in August a festival of ancient and baroque music, opened with fireworks set to music. At the end of the year a medieval market fills the walled town.

The year's great celebration is the festival of the town's patron, the Virgin of the Ermitana, whose image is kept in a hermitage beside the castle. Its main days in September bring Les Danses, a cycle of music, dances and public rituals, and the last weekend adds parades of Moors and Christians. Local societies keep these traditions going, among them a town band named after the Ermitana and associations for the dances and the Moors and Christians.

The municipality had about 8,800 inhabitants in 2025, but in summer the number of people in town rises to more than 150,000, and the two seasons feel like different places. In July and August the North Beach promenade is busy until late, apartments are full and traffic queues along the seafront; in winter many businesses close and the old town is left largely to its residents.

Tourism is the main source of work, alongside the fishing port, whose completion in 1922 was long demanded by fishermen after many deaths in storms at sea. Most of the town's growth has been along the beaches on either side of the rock rather than within the walls. The neighbouring towns of Benicarló and Vinaròs, a short bus ride away, provide the railway station.

The municipality also includes one of the least developed stretches of the Valencian coast, the Serra d'Irta, protected as a natural park. Balancing growth against it is a standing local debate: the town has acknowledged conflicts between tourism and the environment and has been creating new green spaces for residents and visitors.

Peñíscola's cooking rests on its fishing tradition and the vegetable gardens of the plain behind it. Rice dishes come first, in their seafood forms: paella, the Valencian rice dish named after the wide, shallow pan in which it is cooked over an open fire; arròs a banda, rice cooked in fish stock and usually served with alioli, a dish that began with fishermen who sold their best catch and kept the rest for stock; and fideuà, which is made like a seafood paella but with pasta noodles instead of rice and is seasoned mainly with lemon.

The town's own specialities include all i pebre made with monkfish or with small octopus, known locally as polpet; suquet de peix, the fish stew also called remescló; and paelleta. Shellfish are prominent — mussels, langoustines and snails known as caragol punxent — and the traditional stew of the area is the olleta.

The restaurants of the old town and of the seafront along Avinguda del Papa Luna serve most of these, often on terraces looking at the castle. Inland, the mountain town of Morella is known for its bakeries and its sweet flaons, and the Monday market on Carrer del Mestre Bayarri sells local produce.