The story begins with stone. When the Moors held the Iberian Peninsula, they raised a fortress on the heights a few miles inland from the sea and called it Polop. Its defensive value made it a prize for centuries. In 1089 and 1090, the Castilian warlord Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, remembered as El Cid Campeador, seized Polop Castle, an episode recorded in the medieval chronicle Historia Roderici. It was a step on the road to his greatest conquest: the city of Valencia, which fell to him in 1094. The castle that anchored the barony was already old and already fought over before the barony itself had a name.

After the Christian reconquest, Polop passed through a tangle of royal hands that reads like a court drama. King James I of Aragon entrusted the castle to a Muslim leader, Mohammad Abu Abdallah Ben Hudzail al Sahuir, until 1258, when the man was defeated after a reported plot against the king's life. In 1268 James granted the barony to Berenguela Alfonso, who had become his companion after his wife, Teresa Gil de Vidaure, was said in the chronicles to have fallen ill with leprosy. On Berenguela's death without children the lordship reverted to the Crown, then passed to a knight, Beltran de Bellpuig, and later to an admiral, Bernat de Sarria. For much of the 14th century the infantes, the princes of Aragon, held it and styled themselves Barons of Polop.

In 1430 the barony came to the Fajardo de Mendoza family, in whose line it has remained ever since. Its most consequential holder was Dona Beatriz Fajardo de Mendoza y Guzman, who inherited a Benidorm that had crumbled to almost nothing, absorbed into Polop and stripped of its standing as a town. She refused to let it die. In 1666 she repopulated the settlement, issued it a new charter of settlement, and fixed municipal boundaries close to those it keeps today. Crucially, she solved the problem that had always limited the coast: water. By ordering the Reg Major of l'Alfas, an irrigation channel, and founding the Nou Reg to water 1,207 hectares of land, she turned a barren ghost town into a place people could farm and live. The modern city of Benidorm grew from that seed.

Feudalism was supposed to end. The Spanish Abolition of Feudal Tenure Act of 1820 stripped lordships like Polop of their legal and juridical power, dissolving the old machinery of barons who could raise armies, hold courts, and levy dues. Yet the law preserved the dignity of the honor itself, the right to the title and the coat of arms. So the barony became obsolete but, as its historians put it, never extinct. Passed by blood down the generations of the Fajardo de Mendoza family, it survives into the present day, currently represented by Francisco de Borja de la Pena Fernandez-Garnelo. An 800-year-old lordship persists, quietly, above a coastline now defined by hotels and holidaymakers who mostly have no idea it was ever there.