Food is Denia's calling card, and the red prawn is only the beginning. The town claims a three-Michelin-star restaurant in Quique Dacosta, whose cooking draws diners from across Europe, but its deeper culinary identity lies in humbler, sea-born dishes. There is arros a banda, a rice cooked in fish broth that is taken seriously enough to anchor a national cooking competition, and suquet de peix, the fisherman's stew of whatever the boats brought in. This is a rice-and-seafood culture refined over centuries, where the line between everyday cooking and high gastronomy has worn thin.

Long before the Michelin inspectors arrived, Denia was already old. Its history predates the Romans, who knew a settlement here, and reaches back to a place the Greeks may have called Hemeroscopeion; it continued through the long Moorish centuries and never stopped. The castle at the town's centre tells that story in stone. It was the refuge around which the old town gathered, and the historic quarter still spreads from it down to the harbour and the original marina. Walk the cobbled pedestrian streets today and you pause for tapas where fishermen once mended nets, along the elegant Carrer Marques de Campos.

For all its focus on the water, Denia lives in the shadow of a mountain. The great massif of the Montgo rises just to the south, a limestone whale-back that shelters the town and gives its hikers somewhere to climb; on one side of Denia lies the Mediterranean, on the other the distant mountains, and the town occupies the fertile ground between. That setting is part of why almost everywhere you turn there are ruins, fragments of the Iberian, Roman, and Moorish past worked into the fabric of a town that has simply kept living on the same spot for three thousand years.

Denia's shoreline runs for some twenty-six kilometres and changes character as it goes. To the north stretch the sandy beaches of Las Marinas, broad and gentle, made for families and long afternoons in the sun, many of them flying the blue flag for clean water and safe swimming. To the southeast the coast hardens into Les Rotes, a rocky shore where the real interest lies underwater: divers and snorkellers come for a Mediterranean seabed alive with fish, squid, octopus, and sea urchins. Between the two lie the marinas, where sailing yachts and motor cruisers ride at anchor. The newest of them, on the town's southern flank, has become a place to promenade in its own right, its waterfront lined with restaurants where diners look out over sail and motor alike.

Denia has always been a place people pass through as well as to. It sits almost exactly halfway between the airports of Alicante and Valencia, an easy hour down the autopista from either, and its harbour sends ferries out to Ibiza and the other Balearic Islands. In summer the town's population of around forty-seven thousand can more than double as visitors pour in for the beaches and the food. Xabia lies ten minutes south; the whole Marina Alta opens up around it. Denia is the northern gateway to the Costa Blanca, equally at home welcoming yachts and cooks. Getting around town is simple: the local DeniBus network runs a handful of routes out from the Esplanade Cervantes, and beyond the buses the whole coast is stitched together by road, rail, and the ferries that make Denia feel less like a terminus than a hinge between Spain and the islands.