✦ Day trips
Baños de la Reina, El Campello’s best-kept secret
When people ask us for a place only the locals know, this is the answer.
✦ Day trips
When people ask us for a place only the locals know, this is the answer.
Sometimes a guest asks us for something different. They’ve seen the castle, eaten rice and been down to Postiguet, and they want to know where we’d go on a free day. We don’t send them to Tabarca or Altea, which are the day trips people ask us for most. We tell them to go to the Baños de la Reina, in El Campello. It’s the place only the locals know.
And you get there by tram from right outside the door.
The name means “the Queen’s Baths”, but they aren’t baths, and there was no queen. They’re Roman fish tanks, carved into the rock at the water’s edge. You can still make out the pools and the channels that connected them to the sea. This is where fish were farmed. Over the centuries, local tradition took them for the baths of a Moorish queen, and the name stuck.
They’re part of the Illeta dels Banyets, an archaeological site with more than five thousand years of history: there are remains from the Bronze Age, the Iberian period and the Roman period, one on top of the other, on a tongue of land that runs out into the sea. It’s looked after by the MARQ, Alicante’s Archaeological Museum.
You don’t need to know anything about archaeology to enjoy it. It’s rock, sea and ancient stone, with nothing around it to get in the way. And right next to it there’s a beach with the same name, the Illeta dels Banyets beach.
If you like being in the water, El Campello’s tourist office has a snorkelling route called, precisely, Los Baños de la Reina, with a leaflet you can download from their website.
The Mercado tram stop is a four-minute walk from the studio. From there, take line 3 (L3), which goes to El Campello and runs every 15 minutes. Get off at the El Campello stop. A single ticket costs €1.45.
It’s the easiest way to go: no car, no hunting for parking and no watching the clock to get back. The full tram timetable is on the TRAM d’Alacant website.
The site has set visiting hours. These are the winter hours:
They change in summer, so before you set off check the current hours on the MARQ website. Admission is inexpensive, and the MARQ also runs guided tours.
Two tips that follow from those hours. Don’t leave it for a Monday. And if you go on a Sunday, make it the morning: it’s closed in the afternoon.
It’s a morning or an afternoon out, not a full day. That leaves you time to get back to the centre, stop at the Mercado Central, five minutes from the door, and have dinner in the studio. They all have a kitchen with a ceramic hob, microwave, fridge, dishwasher, coffee maker, toaster, kettle and crockery. There’s no oven or griddle, but for fish from the market and a salad it’s more than enough.
If you book directly with us, we provide the pastries for breakfast. And if it’s your last day, ask about late check-out: it’s free, subject to availability, and gives you time to go to El Campello in the morning before you leave the studio.
Everything else around us, from the castle and the beaches to the market and the other day trips, is on our Area guide page.
Information checked in September 2026. The site’s opening hours change with the season: check them on the MARQ website before you go.