Alicante Air Raid Shelters: 94 Civil War Bunkers Under the City

Under Plaza de Séneca, where buses idle today and students cut diagonally toward Calle Italia, a fifty-one meter tunnel opens up. For two years it sheltered more than a thousand people from a rain of bombs. It is not a secret: a staircase marks it, a plaque tells the story. But you walk over it without knowing, as Alicantinos do every day, until you decide to go down.

Alicante holds ninety-four of these shelters. Some rehabilitated, others sealed, others still buried. It is one of the densest civil-protection networks of the Spanish Civil War, and since 20 March 2026 an association of official guides has opened eight of them to the public.

A city beneath a city

In 1936, when the war broke out, Alicante had eighteen shelters and capacity for 8,070 people. Not enough. The city, loyal to the Republic and home to a strategic port, began digging under plazas, markets, schools, gardens.

When the war ended in April 1939, the records counted ninety-four shelters built or under construction. Theoretical capacity: 108,590 people. Almost the entire population of Alicante at the time.

Neighbors, soldiers, political prisoners, and women dug them. The walls still hold original graffiti. "The spy is listening", reads one in the Séneca gallery, a warning among those who huddled there not quite sure whom to trust.

The morning of 25 May 1938

It was a Wednesday. At 8:10 in the morning, between seven and nine Italian Savoia Marchetti SM.79 "Sparviero" bombers took off from Mallorca. By 11:18 they were over central Alicante, dropping roughly ninety bombs: 56 weighing one hundred kilos, eight of twenty, twenty of fifteen.

The sirens did not sound. The Mercado Central at Avenida de Alfonso el Sabio, number 10, was bustling at that hour. The bombs pierced the roof and exploded among the stalls.

The figures vary by source. More than three hundred dead in some counts. The municipal cemetery registry recorded one hundred men, fifty-six women, more than ten children, and over a hundred unidentified bodies. Later studies cite 393 deaths and hundreds wounded. What every source agrees on is the magnitude: a massacre.

It is considered one of the first major planned bombings against civilian population in modern history. Four years before the London Blitz, two before Coventry, a year and a half before the start of the Second World War.

R31 Plaza de Séneca: 51 meters and 1,200 places

Shelter R31, rediscovered in 2015 during the plaza's rehabilitation works, stretches as a fifty-one meter central corridor with thirty-eight cubicles distributed on both sides. The bunks of a buried ship.

Its theoretical capacity was 1,200 people. In practice, on the worst days they crowded in more tightly. Concrete benches along the walls. Bulbs fed by a generator. A rudimentary ventilation system.

The light inside is still dim, yellowish, never quite reaching the corners. And there, on the wall, the graffiti. Quick, almost childlike handwriting. Someone wrote "The spy is listening". Someone drew a plane.

R46 Plaza del Doctor Balmis: four hundred meters away

The second visitable shelter of route one is a short walk from the first, in the heart of the Ensanche neighborhood. Another gallery with its own geometry: different plan, different ventilation, different atmosphere.

Between the two, at Calle Portugal number 15, on the corner with Calle Italia, the Town Hall opened the Civil War Interpretation Center. Models, period photographs, a reconstruction of the bombing on 25 May. Route one begins there.

The six guided routes: how to visit them today

Since 20 March 2026, the Association of Official Guides of the Comunitat Valenciana offers six different itineraries. The eight visitable shelters are distributed among them, combined with key sites of the city's Republican history.

Hours for the general public: Monday to Friday at 5:00 p.m., Saturday and Sunday at 10:00 a.m. Price: 4.95 € for the general public, 2.97 € for schools. Bookings by email at refugios@guiasoficialescv.com.

Route one, the one you will probably take first, combines the interpretation center, R31 Séneca, and R46 Balmis. An hour and a half. Mild slopes, stairs, narrow spaces.

Why go down

To live in Alicante is to live on layers. Roman Lucentum in Albufereta. The medieval city whose walls still show in Santa Cruz. And, between them, this more recent and painful layer: ninety-four galleries dug by people afraid at eleven in the morning of a market day.

If you live in or are thinking of moving to the city center, there is a real chance that a shelter lies within two hundred meters of your front door. You will not see it in the listing. You will feel it when you go down those stairs and the silence settles.

If you want to discover an Alicante that pulses with this density of history, explore our properties or contact us.