Fuentes del Algar: 7 natural pools 42 km from Alicante

The water arrives without asking permission. It rises from below, crosses fifteen kilometres of stone in the dark and, at a precise point south of the Sierra de Bernia, decides to surface. That is how the Algar river is born, as if the mountain were exhaling. You are three kilometres from the town of Callosa d'en Sarrià and forty-two from Alicante, but the noise of the water makes any distance irrelevant.

People come down the steps with a towel on the shoulder. The birds fall silent for a second when someone slides into the first pool. Then they pick up again. The water sits at the same temperature in July as in February: seventeen or eighteen degrees Celsius. That means it bites in August and it is just bearable to dip your feet in January. The sierra produces a constancy that the beaches, right across the way, never have.

Why the Algar river surfaces here

The Sierra de Bernia is Eocene limestone, folded by the collision of the African and Eurasian plates tens of millions of years ago. That rock, the one you see cut into vertical walls above your head, lets itself dissolve, slowly, in water. When it rains on the ridge, water seeps into the cracks, widens them, carves caves and galleries. The technical word is karst. The Algar river is what becomes visible of a much longer underground journey.

The name «Algar» most likely comes from Arabic and means «cave». Place names in the Marina Baixa sometimes tell you what the water saw before it came out.

A 1.5 kilometre circuit and seven pools

From the main entrance to the far end of the site, the path runs for a kilometre and a half. You walk it on concrete steps, wooden boardwalks, stretches of beaten earth. The seven «tolls» (the Valencian word for river pools deep enough to swim in) are staggered along the course. Each has its own name and size.

The Toll Blau is the most photographed: water nearly turquoise, walls closing in. The Toll de la Presa preserves an old structure that once regulated the flow for a mill. The Toll de la Caldera waits at the end, beneath the highest waterfall of the route, just over ten metres. It lands on the back of your neck like a massage and reminds you, at the same time, that water was never in a hurry.

There are smaller pools too, some almost hidden in the reedbeds. Walk slowly. Look twice.

What grows around the water

The riverbed is flanked by poplars, ash and elm: the riparian woodland that follows any river with steady humidity. Along the lower banks grow bulrushes and water lilies. Higher up, away from the channel, broom and mastic shrubs paint the slopes yellow and red depending on the month.

The kingfisher passes fast, an electric blue streak over the current. The nightingale sings at night and at first light. Grey herons come down occasionally to the wider pools. The Generalitat Valenciana declared the site a Protected Wetland Zone on 10 September 2002, and since then the ecosystem has held its ground alongside the visitors.

When to come, what it costs, what hours

From April to September the site opens 9:00 to 20:00. From October to March, 9:00 to 15:30. Last admission is forty-five minutes before closing. In July and August, demand splits the day into three sessions (9:00 to 13:00, 13:00 to 16:00, 16:00 to 20:00) to keep the pools from filling up.

Entry is four euros in low season, five in high. There is a reduced four-euro ticket for visitors over sixty-five and accredited students. Free parking sits next to the Callosa tourist office, about seven hundred metres from the entrance, with closer private lots at around five euros.

If you want to swim alone, come on a Tuesday in May or September and walk in at nine. July weekends are beautiful, but the feeling of solitude evaporates.

How to get there from Alicante

The fast way is the AP-7 toward Valencia, exit 65 for Callosa d'en Sarrià. It is forty-two kilometres and about forty-five minutes by car. The last stretch, the CV-755, cuts through orchards of medlars. From Benidorm it is fifteen kilometres on the CV-70. From Alfaz del Pi, twenty.

The medlar of Callosa d'en Sarrià has held Protected Designation of Origin status since 14 June 1991, and the protected production zone covers nineteen municipalities of the Marina Baixa. If you pass in April or May, the trees are heavy with orange fruit. A whole town lives off that.

An outing, and also a map of villages

The Fuentes del Algar are the excuse. Anyone who comes for the first time tends to discover, almost by accident, a constellation of inland villages: Bolulla, Tárbena, Polop, Guadalest, Sella. White houses glued to the hillside, baroque churches, miradors that seem to hang from the Sierra de Aitana.

For anyone looking for a second home or a slower life further from the open coast, this inland strip of the Marina Baixa works differently: a degree or two cooler in summer, steadier prices, a small community that knows itself at the market. The afternoon light on the Sierra de Bernia repays the climb up the road.

If stone houses among medlar orchards call to you, you can explore our properties across the province of Alicante or contact us to talk about the Marina Baixa at your own pace.