Torrevieja is young by Spanish standards. While inland towns like Villena and Elche count their history in millennia, this stretch of coast held little more than a defensive tower and open scrub until the 1700s. The first real settlement was a modest fishing village, its people drawn by two things the sea offered: fish and salt. That late start shows in the town's character. There is no medieval old quarter of tangled lanes here, no cathedral rising over a Roman street grid. Torrevieja is a working coastal town that became a resort, and it wears its newness openly, all seafront promenades, marina masts, and apartment blocks stacked toward the water.

The real wealth was never in the harbor but behind it. Torrevieja sits between two great salt lagoons, now protected as a natural park, that have been worked for their salt for generations and rank among the most productive salt operations in Europe. One of them, the Laguna de Torrevieja, is famous for turning a startling shade of pink, its water dyed rose by salt-loving microorganisms until it looks less like a lake than a spill of strawberry milk against the blue Mediterranean. This salt did more than season food. In earlier centuries it filled the holds of ships bound for Cuba, and the sailors who made that crossing carried home the habanera, the Caribbean song that Torrevieja adopted so completely it now hosts the world's leading contest in the genre.

For most visitors, though, the draw is simpler: the shoreline. Torrevieja commands roughly twenty kilometers of coast, with six broad beaches, La Mata, Cabo Cervera, Los Locos, El Cura, Los Náufragos, and Ferris, strung between some twenty smaller coves where low cliffs give way to clear water. Small sightseeing boats slip out of the marina to run the coastline, and a few make for Tabarca, the little island off the coast toward Alicante. The town keeps a floating museum in its harbor as well, where visitors can climb down into the retired Spanish submarine Delfín, a rare chance to stand inside a real warship at rest on the water.

Tourism remade Torrevieja, and the change is visible in its streets and in its languages. So many Spaniards and other Europeans have bought holiday homes here that the town supports its own English-language newspapers, radio, and television, and the satellite districts of La Zenia and Playa Flamenca hum with bars and restaurants that hire English-speaking staff for the summer rush. That success has its shadows, from clever pickpockets working the busy Friday market to the scramble for a parking space in high season. But the essential trade-off suits the place. A town that began as a single tower watching an empty sea now watches over a crowd from half the countries of Europe, all of them come for the same salt-scented light.