The Rio Vinalopó is Alicante’s river. It flows pretty much the whole length of Alicante province before finally reaching the Mediterranean at Santa Pola.
On its 95km journey south, it flows past lofty castles, over dams, along a myriad of irrigation channels and through town centres. Finally it wanders through a maze of waterways among the salinas – the salt pans – of Santa Pola to the sea.
The trail to the mouth of the Vinalopó (la desembocadura) is a short walk that takes you into the Parc Natural de las Salinas, along a wind-swept beach, with huge skies above and the flat wetlands of the salt pans stretching inland.
Over the years, Santa Pola has become saturated with tourist developments which straggle endlessly along the coastline. But you leave all that behind on this walk.
Let’s get started!
You can’t miss the start of the walk at the end of Playa Tamarit – there are huge white mountains of sea salt just off to your right. They’ve been producing the stuff here since Roman times and it’s sold all over Spain.
There’s a little salt museum just up the road – link here. And after your walk, you can buy some Santa Pola salt here at the offices of Bras del Port, the company that runs the salt industry hereabouts.
Close to the start of the walk, you come across a reminder of the Spanish civil war – a concrete bunker built to defend the beach. Santa Pola was in the Republican zone, so this fortification would have been built against a Francoist attack, which never actually came. You’ll come across a couple more bunkers further along the walk.
Walk on to the restored jetty (Muelle de las Salinas) where cargoes of salt would have been brought on carts for loading onto boats. A barcaza – one of the traditional boats used for carrying salt – lies gently decaying and half-buried nearby.
The lagoons used for making salt extend for miles behind the dunes that line the back of the beach. A network of dikes and sluices allowed the seawater to flood in and be held until the water evaporated under the fierce Costa Blanca sun, leaving the salt behind. That’s still how they do it, even now.
Ahead of you, the coast curves around to Guardamar del Segura and Torrevieja. On the horizon behind you is the island of Tabarca, a couple of miles offshore – the smallest inhabited island in Spain.
There’s plenty of bird life along the way too – cormorants fishing, gannets plunging vertically into the sea, and egrets feeding on the sandbanks fringing the Vinalopó as it flows into the Mediterranean.
Reaching the mouth of the Vinalopó
Walking to the mouth of the Vinalopó is a gentle 45 minutes stroll along the beach. For the river, it’s a quiet and rather unobtrusive end to a journey that began way up in the Sierra Mariola mountains, in the north of Alicante province.
The course of the Vinalopó actually gets a bit lost in the maze of lagoons and channels that link the Salinas de Santa Pola with the wetland nature reserve of El Hondo, just a few kilometres inland.
But this is the official mouth of the river, the one that everyone agrees on. There’s even a sign to mark the spot, so argument over!
The river is shallow so you can wade across and continue along the beach. Fine in summer, not so fine in winter! So we headed back the way we came, back to the mountains of salt.
Trail map here:
Follow our route on wikiloc:
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© Guy Pelham