The Tourism Department is busy preparing the programme for ‘100 years of tourism in Calpe’, which aims to recognise the municipality's tourist industry. The origin of the date can be traced back to visits to Calpe by a group of intellectuals and artists during the first third of the 20th century, including Oscar Esplá, Gabriel Miró, Germán Bernácer and Emilio Varela.
The Alicante-Calpe railway dates to 1915 and there is evidence of inns in the municipality at that time, although the Paradero de Ifac did not open its doors until 1935. In addition, there is a play by Azorín entitled Ifach, a comedy in three acts set in the municipality, which must have been written by Azorín between 1926 and 1930. All of this has led the Department of Tourism to establish 1926 as the starting date for the centenary.
Among the activities already planned is a talk by Antonio Michavila, associate professor at the University of Alicante, on Azorín's comedy Ifach. The lecture will take place on 17 March at Casa Nova.
Another initiative is to incorporate Calpe into the Virtual Tourism Museum, a museum in the digital world dedicated to exploring and showcasing tourism as a cultural, social and economic phenomenon, accessible from electronic devices and focused on preserving and sharing the memory of tourism through digital collections and archives.
There are also plans to organise an exhibition with photographs and documents that trace the history of tourism promotion in Calpe, the first tourists who arrived in the municipality and the first establishments where they stayed. The celebration will be rounded off with a series of conferences to discuss 100 years of tourism in Calpe, which will include an academic component and the participation of those responsible for tourism policy in recent years.
The celebration of this anniversary aims to pay tribute to the history of tourism in Calpe, to those who have worked in the industry and to the changes that this human activity has undergone over time, but at the same time it aims to open a debate on the challenges facing the municipality as a tourist destination.
The Councillor for Tourism, Marco Bittner, pointed out that "A town that does not know its history is doomed to improvise its destiny. In Calpe, I believe it is time for us all to choose to honour our roots to project a solid, sustainable and vibrant future. This series of events is an initiative of the Department of Tourism that aims to be a reflection on the 21st century, so that after 100 years of tourism, the citizens can see that the course of Calpe has always been marked by the decisions of the residents as a group and that now the decision of what kind of town we want to be will depend on a collective decision and a momentum that we all take together".