The ancient historian Diodorus credited the settlement's founding to Hamilcar Barca, the Carthaginian general and father of Hannibal. To the Greeks it was the White Promontory; the Romans, following the same sense, would call it the bright place. Perched between the Iberian interior and the Mediterranean, the town lived by trade, and it traded widely - with Greece, with Phoenicia, with the rich southern kingdom of Tartessos, absorbing something from each. Out of that mixture grew a distinct local culture that the Roman writers Pliny the Elder and Strabo named the Contestani. Even now, the deepest layers of the ruins keep their Carthaginian stamp, older than anything Rome would build on top of them.

Lucentum reached its height between the first century BC and the first century AD, and it is Rome's hand that shows most plainly in what survives. The Romans built over the Iberian town, leaving little of it but the walls, and laid out a proper city: a forum, public baths, a defensive wall studded with the foundations of older towers, and streets of houses spread across some thirty thousand square metres. Then the tide turned. From the second century the town slipped into decline, undercut by its neighbour Ilici - today's Elche - which had better roads and water and slowly drew away Lucentum's trade. By the end of the third century the place was all but empty. Centuries later, its silent ground served only as a Muslim cemetery.

For a long time no one was sure where the ancient city had stood. The first real clue came in 1780, when Antonio Valcarcel Pio de Saboya, the Count of Lumiares, argued that the ruins he had been digging at Tossal de Manises were Lucentum itself - against the settled opinion that the Roman town lay somewhere else entirely. Later excavators uncovered the Carthaginian layers beneath. In the 1930s, road construction cut through an ancient necropolis, and out of it came a striking haul now held in the Archaeological Museum of Alicante: bronze cauldrons, Iberian pottery painted with birds and fish, jewellery, weapons, and amulets carried all the way from Egypt. The elegant sculpted head known as the Kore de Alicante may have come from this very hill.

By the middle of the twentieth century the ruins occupied prime coastal land, with a fine view over the old lagoon and bay - which made them a target for the developers reshaping the Costa Blanca. The site might have disappeared entirely but for the people who fought to keep it, above all the Swedish archaeologist Solveig Nordstrom, who made its defence her cause. In 1961 Lucentum was declared an Artistic and Historic Monument, winning it a measure of legal protection. The protection could not hold back the cranes; the ruins today stand ringed by high-rise blocks, anything but pristine. Yet they endured. Restored and consolidated in the 1990s, they remain open to anyone who wants to walk the streets of the White Citadel and stand where Alicante began.