Castillo de San Fernando: the forgotten fortress of El Tossal

There are two hills in Alicante. Everyone knows one. Almost no one knows the other. The silhouette of Santa Barbara Castle sits on top of Benacantil, in every postcard, in every holiday rental photo. Across the way, 87 metres above the sea, rises El Tossal, and on its summit lives a fortress most locals could not draw from memory. It is called Castillo de San Fernando, and its story is the story of a soldier who prepared for a battle that never arrived.

A war that never came

The year was 1809. Napoleonic troops were advancing across the Peninsula and Alicante's Defence Council asked Sevillian military engineer Pablo Ordovas y Sastre for a study on how to fortify El Tossal. The idea was twofold: build a second defensive line covering the back of Santa Barbara Castle and, while at it, provide a military prison. Construction began that same year, with the help of much of the civilian population, and continued until 1813. The new castle was named after the king, Ferdinand VII.

The strange part is that it never went into service. The French stopped at the gates. General Louis-Pierre Montbrun bombarded the city on 16 January 1812 from the Altozano area, but he did not dare with the fortified plaza. Alicante never fell. The Castillo de San Fernando opened brand new, ready and silent. A freshly minted fortress that never did what it was built for.

The shape of fear

The layout is irregular, because El Tossal is irregular. Ordovas drew a polygonal bastion on the northern front, a rounded, almost truncated cone bastion on the southwest end, and connected them with broken curtain walls following the curves of the hill. To the south, facing the city, he raised a great circular bastion, an elevated platform like a stone balcony over the rooftops. Two demi-bastions and a small ravelin covered the weakest flanks.

The main access climbs from the ensanche, between the Campoamor and Mercado neighbourhoods, along a ramp originally laid out in zigzag and notably steep. It ends at the Puerta de los Leones, the Gate of the Lions, once crossed by a drawbridge. Two pillars topped by stone lions, probably added later, welcomed visitors. They are still there, weathered, watching the city without blinking.

From Napoleonic prison to concentration camp

If the castle's military history saw no bullets, it did see prisoners. It was conceived in part as a jail. In 1939, at the end of the Civil War, Franco's troops took Alicante and reactivated the fort as a concentration camp to confine the thousands of Republican prisoners trapped at the port. That use lasted only a few months but left a dark chapter in the memory of the place. Then came decades of silence, vegetation climbing the walls and a name slowly fading from the mental map of the city.

The forgotten one returns to the light

The Castillo de San Fernando was declared a Bien de Interes Cultural in 2001, and since then Alicante City Hall has folded it into the EDUSI Las Cigarreras strategy, co-financed by the European Union through the FEDER fund. The Smart City Las Cigarreras operation concentrates investments of around 22 million euros in the corridor connecting both castles and the five surrounding neighbourhoods. For the fortified compound itself, the city pushed forward an architectural rehabilitation project worth around 2.4 million euros that has consolidated walls, recovered the bridge and the main access, and reorganised the surroundings with benches, lampposts, trees and a new viewpoint.

El Tossal as urban park

At the foot of the castle, on the slope, lies Parque Monte Tossal. It opened in 1995 over 63,000 square metres of former quarry and military land. The original idea was very Alicantino: turn the hill into a scaled model of the Valencian Community, with terraces evoking each comarca. Today it is one of the green lungs of the centre, with a pond, multi-use sports courts, a refurbished skatepark, a climbing wall, mini golf, a cafe and trails snaking up to the summit. In the morning it smells of pine. At dusk the sky over the Mediterranean turns orange and the castle's silhouette stands out against Santa Barbara, the two hills talking to each other above the rooftops.

Living near El Tossal

Anyone looking for a home in Alicante usually asks first about Playa de San Juan, the historic centre, Cabo de las Huertas. El Tossal belongs to a different, more everyday geography: the contour of Campoamor, Pla del Bon Repos, Mercado, Carolinas Bajas. Buildings from the fifties and sixties, streets with neighbourhood bars, municipal markets within walking distance, and the rare luck of having a 6.3-hectare park around the corner. These are areas that spent long years out of focus and are now, with the regeneration of Las Cigarreras and the castle itself, beginning to move. It is not the postcard from the first tourist walk. It is a way of living Alicante from inside, on a gentle slope, with swifts at sunrise and the silhouette of Benacantil always in the background.

How to get there and what you will find

You walk up, in no hurry. The main ramp starts near the Mercado Central, zigzags between pines and ends in front of the stone lions. Access to the outer enclosure is free, though it is worth checking the schedule on the City Hall portal before going up, because the rehabilitation works keep changing the visitable area. Bring water, comfortable shoes and, above all, time to sit at the top. The reward is an unfiltered view: the port, the Explanada, El Postiguet beach, the palm trees of Parque de Canalejas, the Old Town pressed against Benacantil, and the sea behind it all.

Few places tell so well what Alicante is: a city that learned to wait between two hills, without hurry, with the light shifting from hour to hour.

If this way of discovering Alicante matches the way you imagine life here, we invite you to explore our properties in the Tossal and central neighbourhoods, or to contact us to talk calmly about what you are looking for.