So, why Peñiscola? Let me try to explain why I fell in love with this town and why you should as well.
Peñiscola is a well known holiday spot for Spaniards and by some account also well-known in France. Germans and Brits are not so familiar with it but this may change. Peñiscola has a long history most prominent starting in the 8th century when the Arabs ruled the city until the 13th century. In the following years the Temple Order started to built the famous castle which became later on the home of the Pope Bendedict XIII, also called Papa Luna, the last Avignon pope (People in Peñiscola will call him always Papa/ Pope while the Vatican called him Antipope).
Nowadays the old town (casco antiguo) still maintains the medieval look of a wealthy fishermen’s village that is ruled by the old Templar castle. The city has some strict rules for the old town how the streets and facades should look which makes it so gorgeous. It is pretty small with about 15 streets and they are not so easy to reach. Traffic is reduced to the bare minimum and lot of streets are even not passable for cars. Work on buildings like masonry is only allowed outside the holiday season, meaning you can improve your house only between October and March.
But as lovely as it looks it has also some drawbacks; if you want to enter the casco antiguo you have to mount some stairs and normal infrastructure like a bakery, a super market, a post office are only in the new town below the old village. You have lot of options to get a great meal and for sure there is no lack of bars and clubs, but you wouldn’t find a pharmacy up in the old town.
So there is this old village on that peninsula and the rest of Peñiscola that is on sea level and stretches wide to the north with a lovely sandy beach and another beach on the southside, not so big, followed by some residential areas and behind those a natural preserve, la Serra d’Irta. Most of the visitors will find a place in one of the big hotels or apartment buildings on the north beach. During the summer months the city will grow from a small town of 8.000 inhabitants to a quite busy town of 150.000.
If you ask what makes it so special there are some reasons: The exceptional geography with the peninsula that is nearly an island, the still maintained character of this medieval town and this combined with the best of Spain which is the sea, the beaches, the lovely climate, the exceptional food and wine. What else do you need?