Old Town
La Vila Joiosa is colour. The old quarter of La Vila Joiosa has preserved its popular architecture. It has been declared a Site of Cultural Interest and, as stated in its declaration as a Historic Site, "it is perhaps the best preserved centre in the Valencian Community".
La Vila Joiosa was not a town of noble families but of fishermen, sailors, merchants and industrialists, which is why we find almost no stone architecture but traditional houses of plastered masonry painted in different colours, making it the best preserved example of the traditional polychromy of the Western Mediterranean, along with Girona, Malta or a neighbourhood in Venice. Its cheerful façades invite us to walk down its narrow streets and discover, through this labyrinth of colours, thousands of hidden details : decorated roofs, niches, grilles, balconies...
Its cheerful façades invite us to walk down its narrow streets and discover, through this labyrinth of colours, thousands of hidden details : decorated roofs, niches, grilles, balconies...<br/> In this Historic Site we find two extraordinary monuments also declared of Cultural Interest: the Fortress Church of Nuestra Señora de la Asunción, one of the only three fortress churches in the province of Alicante, and the Walls, an extraordinary example of Renaissance urban walls.
From the 16th to the 18th century, La Vila Joiosa was the target of important invasions by Turkish and Algerian corsairs, as well as other military confrontations. As a result of a major corsair attack in 1538 (the historical origin of the Moors and Christians festivities) and another one in 1543 that devastated the town, in the middle of the century a Royal Order was signed to rebuild the walls.
We know from an engraving that La Vila Joiosa in the last third of the 16th century was surrounded by a walled belt with three circular bastions, with the lower part inclined for a better resistance to cannon fire.
Nowadays , two sections of the wall, one to the west and the other to the northeast, are still intact. The second one runs along the coastline in de Costera de la Mar, between two circular cubes: the one closest to the sea is the 'Baluard del Pou' (Bastion of the Well), because behind it was the most important well in the town, the 'Pou de Sant Vicent', and the other is the 'Baluard del Retor' (Bastion of the Priest) because of its proximity to the abbey. Recently, a strong defensive work has been discovered on the façade of a house, in Costereta street, just where the third bastion, the Portalet bastion, was located. With this discovery and its enhancement, the last of the three Renaissance towers has been recovered, which together with the late medieval castle located in the western corner of the walled city (next to the 'Baluard del Portalet') made of La Vila Joiosa, as the a centre of control of the anti-Corsair defence, one of the best-armed fortresses in the kingdom.
The walls of La Vila Joiosa are an example of a "pre-barricaded Renaissance urban wall”, a very short-lived 'style which disappeared when the 'Vauban' plan (consisting of massive bastions, often triangular in shape, forming star-shaped fortresses) was widely applied". For this reason, the walls of La Vila Joiosa are exceptional and marked the end of an ancient medieval defence system. The Church of the Assumption itself, in Catalan Gothic style, is integrated into the walls as a church-fortress, actually the large apse forms the main tower of the walls.
These walls were declared an Asset of Cultural Interest in 1985.
The Church of Nuestra Señora de la Asunción is one of the Cultural Heritage Sites in the Historic Centre of La Vila Joiosa, also entirely declared BIC (Site of Cultural Interest), and one of only three fortress churches in the province of Alicante.
Like the walls, the whole building shows a military structure. The apse forms a huge tower in the Renaissance wall, with very wide walls and very few windows. The most characteristic feature is the round passage around the roof with arrow holes to shoot at attackers, and a cannon-shaped gargoyle to distract the enemy.
In fact, La Vila Joiosa, as the capital of one of the ten “Requerimentos” (districts of anti-Corsair defence) of the kingdom in the 16th century, was one of the best-armed fortresses in Valencia. A visit to this walkway is highly recommended not only to discover the hidden details of a religious building with a military appearance, but also for the views.
Inside, the church, which is Gothic-Levantine style, has a single nave, chapels between buttresses and little decoration. With the exception of the chapel dedicated to the town's patron saint, Santa Marta, inaugurated in 1740, with many decorative elements and which houses an image of the saint from the 17th century, with her characteristic attributes: a small bucket and a hyssop (holy water sprinkler) with which she dominated a dragon.
La Vila Joiosa was founded in 1301 by the admiral of Jaume II, En Bernat d'En Sarrià. It was a pobla nova, a new town, it did not exist before, although it was built on the ruins of an ancient Roman city. On this hill, next to the town, a late medieval castle was built with a rectangular floor plan and square towers at the corners, around which there was a trench. A castle in which the lord of the town used to live and which in 1708, during the War of the Spanish Succession, was completely destroyed. The stones from this castle were used by the local residents to build the arrabal (a quarter outside the walls) of San Cristóbal.
However, the place where this castle was located kept the name of 'El Castell' and in 2009, after archaeological excavations determined that there were no remains of it, a cultural park was built. These excavations only revealed an aqueduct one and a half metres high, and a section of its vault can be seen in the park.
The castle of La Vila Joiosa was the centre of organisation and control of all the anti-Corsair defence of Villajoyosa's district, which covered the whole of the Marina Baixa area. That is why in this cultural park of 'El Castell' we find different illustrative panels about how the anti-corsair defence was organised from the 16th to the 18th century, and about the Moors and Christians festivities, declared of International Tourist Interest, which have their origin in the corsair attack of 1538. There is also a model of the old town of La Vila Joiosa that allows us, in a visual and tactile way, to know where it was located and what the castle of La Vila was like ...
The most 'typical' image of La Vila Joiosa is this canvas of stone and colour that can be seen from the road bridge or from the south bank of the river Amadorio in its final stretch. The stones of the Renaissance walls and the characteristic colours of the Historic Centre of La Vila Joiosa, one of the best preserved and an example of polychromy in the western Mediterranean, show us the adaptation of the spaces to the different historical moments.
After the Berbers destroyed the city walls and the church in 1543, a Royal Order favoured the reconstruction of these buildings, as La Vila Joiosa, capital of one of the 10 districts of the kingdom for anti-corsair defence, could not afford not to be one of the best-armed fortresses in the kingdom.
With the silk taxes, the 'Generalitat' of the time financed the wall between the city and the river Amadorio. In the War of the Spanish Succession La Vila Joiosa, together with Alicante, was the last town to surrender and the Bourbon troops destroyed the city gates. Although during the 18th century La Vila Joiosa continued to suffer corsair attacks, at the end of the century the Algerian danger disappeared and the wall was no longer useful. At this point the locals began to build on it, unknowingly creating what would become the most photographed image of La Vila Joiosa.
A walk along the Amadorio riverbed, regenerated and transformed into a park, allows us not only to enjoy a green area in the centre of the town, but also to contemplate these coloured houses on the wall from other points of view. Also in this park, right on the other side of the river, we find another remarkable building of La Vila Joiosa, the 'Molí Reial de la Llobeta' (the Royal mill of la Llobeta), which is in the process of being restored.
The 'Plaça Sant Pere' is one of the places in the Old Town of La Vila Joiosa with a special charm. It is located in front of the central beach, on the right side of the Costera de la Mar, so it is part of the maritime seafront of the town.The fishing district that extends down to the beach dates back to the 18th century, when the increase of the population required construction outside the town walls.
This square was built in the very place where the large Roman portual warehouses used to be.
The 'Plaça Sant Pere' was known as the 'Rincón de la Habana',(La Habana´s corner) when in the 19th century La Vila Joiosa was the port of Alcoy. Cloth, tobacco paper and other goods left in large sailing ships for overseas colonies, including Cuba.
Already in the 20th century, the feast of St. Peter, the old patron saint of fishermen, was celebrated here with cucañas, regattas and fairs, also 'Basi' was played. The water in the fountain was coloured in red and coins were thrown in, then the children had to find them.
