The eclipse of 1905 was one of the great scientific events of its day, and its shadow track ran straight through this corner of Spain. Observers came with their telescopes and glass plates, hoping for clear skies and a clean view of the sun's corona, that ghostly halo visible only when the moon blots out the disk entirely. Alcalà de Xivert offered them a stable inland vantage, away from coastal haze, and for those few minutes of totality the town would have fallen quiet, the light draining and the temperature dropping as it does when the moon's shadow races across the ground. Then the sun returned, the visitors packed up, and the town went back to its fields.

The town's name is really a description. Alcalà comes from the Arabic al-qalat, "the castle," so Alcalà de Xivert means, more or less, the castle of Xivert. That castle still stands on the ridge above the town, first built by the Moors in the 10th or 11th century and later rebuilt under the Almohads in the 12th, on a site that commanded the routes running along the Mediterranean coast. Whoever held it controlled the movement of people and goods below. In 1234, during the Christian advance down the eastern seaboard, the fortress and its lands were taken by James I of Aragon, who resettled the place with Christian villagers, and the castle later passed into the hands of the Knights Templar, the warrior monks who held so much of this frontier.

The town sits inland in a flat valley pressed between two mountain ranges, the Serra d'Irta toward the sea and the Serra de les Talaies behind. It is a curiously dry setting: there is no river running through the valley at all. Instead the water surfaces in natural ponds the locals call basses, springs welling up where the geology allows. That quiet, self-contained landscape helped keep the old town focused on its farmland, while in modern times the community's energy has flowed outward to the shore, where the coastal villages of Alcossebre, Capicorb and Les Fonts draw the beachgoers and the marina traffic.

The landmark that announces Alcalà de Xivert from a distance is not the castle but the church. The Església de Sant Joan Baptista, the Church of Saint John the Baptist, was built between 1736 and 1766, a substantial Baroque work with a large dome and a fine ornamented portal. Above it rises a bell tower some sixty-eight metres tall, high enough to be seen from many miles across the valley and the coastal plain. Between the Moorish-and-Templar castle on the ridge and the great church tower below, the town wears its long layered history in stone, the fortress of conquest above and the temple of the settlers that followed it below.

Modern Alcalà de Xivert lives a double life, split between the historic town in the valley and the coast a few kilometres east. Its territory reaches the Mediterranean at a string of seaside settlements, Alcossebre, Capicorb and Les Fonts, and it is there that the town's contemporary economy is centred, on beaches, a busy marina and the summer visitors who fill them. The arrangement is a familiar one along this shore: an old agricultural town set safely inland, out of reach of the corsairs who once haunted the coast, with its beach quarter developed only in the modern age, once the sea became a place of leisure rather than danger. The same water that made this stretch perilous for medieval villagers now makes it prosperous. The eclipse-watchers of 1905, who travelled here for two minutes of darkness, were in their way the first of the visitors who now come every summer for the light.