Living on the Costa Blanca

People who choose the Costa Blanca usually choose between two coasts. The north, the Marina Alta and the Marina Baixa, is green and hilly: Dénia, Xàbia, Teulada-Moraira, Calp and Altea are towns of villas and low buildings below the mountains, with more rain and cooler nights than the south. Benidorm stands apart, a compact city of towers that lives from tourism all year round. The south, from Santa Pola past Torrevieja to Pilar de la Horadada, is flat and drier, with salt lagoons, golf courses and large residential estates; it is where many British, Scandinavian and other European residents have settled.

The city of Alicante sits between the two halves, with the airport, the port, the university and the hospitals of a provincial capital, and the TRAM d'Alacant running up the coast to Benidorm. Living here year-round is different from a summer stay: some resort towns are busy in August and quiet in January, which matters for services, rentals and the crime figures, so the recorded-crime column is shown with two denominators.

The table below lists every town of the zone with the same indicators, so you can see which of these differences show up in the data and which do not.

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