The history of Alicante spans thousands of years. Alicante has been regarded as a strategic military location on the Mediterranean coast of Spain since ancient times. It is protected on the south-west by Cape Santa Pola and on the north-east by Cape Huerta. The fortified complex of Santa Bárbara Castle (), the older parts of which were built in the 9th century, dominates the city from a height of 160 m atop Mount Benacantil, a rocky massif overlooking the sea.
The first settlements in the Alicante area were made by Iberian tribes. Since then it has been inhabited successively by Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Goths, Moors, and Spaniards. Some of the earliest settlements were made on the slopes of Mount Benacantil, where the Santa Bárbara Castle stands today. As a part of the Roman province of Hispania under the name '"Lucentum", it was ruled by the Roman Republic and later the Roman Empire.
Antiquity Phoenician trading city
Phoenician traders began commercial exchanges with the native Iberians of the eastern coast of Spain in the 8th century BC. and had established coastal settlements as far north as the lower River Segura valley in the province of Alicante. By the 7th century BC Phoenicians were introducing the Phoenician alphabet, iron working and the pottery wheel to the Iberians. During the 6th century BC Phocaean Greeks established small trading ports on the coast, Recent excavations of a small, native Iberian coastal trading center at La Picola (Santa Pola) in Alicante province reveal enough Greek architectural elements to suggest a Greek presence at the site.
The Phoenicians founded a trading post at Tossal de Manises, while a settlement at La Fonteta, 28 km south of Alicante, was one of the most important Phoenician cities in the western Mediterranean. It was situated on the right bank of the River Segura estuary on the coast, a strategic position that permitted it to control trade and access to the region's mineral resources through connections it maintained with native Iberian communities. The habitation is surrounded by a defensive wall, punctuated by towers, dating from approximately the first half of the 8th century to the middle of the 6th century BC.
Carthaginian rule By the last years of the 6th century BC, the rival armies of Carthage and Rome began to invade and fight for control of the Iberian Peninsula. The Carthaginian general Hamilcar Barca carried out his Iberian conquests in 237–228 BC, and established the fortified settlement of Ákra Leukḗ, or Akra Leuce, (Greek: , meaning "White Citadel" or "White Promontory"), at the eastern end of the Punic province on the south-eastern coast of Spain, where Alicante stands today.
The material culture evidenced by objects found in the cemeteries at Tossal de les Basses and La Albufereta shows the cultural expressions of people with different cultural backgrounds sharing a common urban space to pursue economic development. This would explain why the settlements at Tossal les Basses and Illeta dels Banyets appear to be well-connected to trade routes on the Mediterranean through their harbour facilities, the movement of goods via maritime trade being developed by merchants.
According to Aranegui and Sánchez, there is no scholarly consensus on how to interpret the impact of foreign groups on local societies, although the cultural interactions between Phoenicians, Greeks, Punics, and indigenous people have been a major focus of archaeological research in the Iberian Peninsula. Some scholars believe that these foreign groups were the driving force behind social and economic change, while others argue that the mere presence of foreign peoples does not necessarily lead to such changes.
The settlement at Tossal de les Basses was situated next to a lagoon on the Mediterranean coast. It had harbour infrastructure and a fortified wall punctuated by towers, dating to the fifth century BC, which suggest that this part of the Spanish coast was becoming increasingly important politically, economically, and socially. Aranegui and Sánchez demonstrate how excavations on the site of the ancient settlement offer a glimpse into interactions between the Punic people and local Iberians. Outside the settlement walls, there was an industrial area where metalworking and pottery were produced. Iron forges and furnaces for smelting galena to extract silver have been found, but comprehensive descriptions of these sites are not yet available. This industrial area provides evidence of the settlement's involvement in trade with other Mediterranean regions. The presence of kilns and pottery factories indicate that it produced goods for export such as amphorae.
Paleoecological studies suggest that the main crops grown in the area were olives, grapes, pomegranates, apples, pears, and figs, which were also likely exported. The seeds of cereal grains have not been found in the industrial area. The coastal settlement at Tossal de les Basses was occupied mainly by people who were involved in the processing and trade of produce including fruits and products derived from them, such as wine, on a large scale not matched in the inland settlements. The evidence suggests that several sites on the southeastern coast of Spain played a major role in the agrarian economy. It is not known whether these agricultural activities took place near the settlements or whether they imported produce from inland sites to process and export.
At the top of the Tossal de les Basses, an Iberian settlement is documented from around the 4th century BC by wooden artefacts recovered in archaeological excavations of wells dug to supply water to an Iberian village. The settlement was abandoned during the Punic conquest of south-eastern Iberia, in which the Carthaginian Barcids established a large fortification in the Tossal de Manises around 230 BC, which years later developed an urban structure. Its place name in the Iberian language could have been LAKKANTÓ, which would refer to the geographical features of the land where the fortified city was located. It is also possible that this is the Akra Leuké mentioned by Diodorus of Sicily.
This large Carthaginian fortification was the first documented use of the Tossal de Manises site. Initially intended strictly for military defence, a few years later it was urbanised and transformed into a fortified city. The new occupation led to the abandonment of the previous Iberian settlement at Tossal de les Basses, and it is probable that the Iberians had relocated to the settlement of Punic origin, which had a port with access to the sea. The Carthaginians called it by the Greek name Leuce, according to Diodorus, who described it as a military camp set up by Hamilcar Barca during the Barcid conquest of part of Iberia around 230 BC.
However, this name was a Phoenician exonym adapted to an existing place name in the Iberian language, whose exact spelling is not known. One of the most recent theories is that the name is based on the topography of the terrain, so "LAK" corresponds to "cove", and "KANT" to "hill", with the Iberian genitive in the suffix - Ó, giving rise to the name "LAKKANT (Ó)", meaning "those of the hillside cove". Dexter Hoyos writes that text-editors have altered the Latin name "Castrum Altum" that appears in Livy's manuscripts to "Castrum Album", mistakenly connecting it to Acra Leuce, which was identified with Alicante.
Roman conquest
The city was destroyed in 209 BC during the Second Punic War, and the fortification abandoned; thus the settlement was in a state of neglect throughout the 2nd century BC, but during the Sertorian War, fought from 80 to 72 BC, it was rebuilt, and under the Principate of Augustus (27 BC-14 AD) it was refounded as a municipality under Latin law, with the name Lucentum. The toponym is first attested in inscriptions and in history books at this time. The name Lucentum appearing in ancient sources has in the past been placed by later historians at different points in Alicante, but historiography has accepted its location at the Tossal de Manises since the 1990s.
The reconstruction led to later urban development. Sometime between 30 and 20 BC the city's first forum was built marking Lucentum's new status as a municipium, perhaps about 26 BC, near the beginning of the reign of Augustus. This was followed by the planning and construction of the rest of the city that would last until the first decades of the 1st century AD.
Lucentum had a period of some splendour from the end of the 1st century BC through the 1st century AD. Despite this early vitality, the city began to decline in the time of Vespasian, during whose reign the tasks of maintaining the sewer system of the forum, as well as the public baths, were abandoned.
During the 1st and 2nd centuries, looting and dumping of waste took place in the forum area, and the city declined gradually throughout the 2nd century. The 3rd century saw the abandonment of the city when it lost its status as a Roman municipality, the municipium of Lucentum, whose territory would be assimilated into that of Ilici, (today's Elche). The chief cause of Lucentum's decline was competition from Ilici, which had better water and land communications (it stood on the Via Augusta) and began to usurp Lucentum's trade. The place name must have survived linked to the place, as in the 7th century the Geographer of Ravenna mentions Lucentes. Remains of comestibles from the Late Roman period found by archaeologist Paul Reynolds in the present-day Benalúa urban area include hulled barley, wheat, lentils and peas, pine nuts, peaches, and grapes. He has also recovered traces there of saltwort and sea blite, plants growing in the saltmarsh that were used to make soda ash flux for the manufacture of glass.
An urban nucleus was established on the slopes of Mount Benacantil, where have been found the remains of a Late Roman settlement for which the same Romanised name Lacant was used, that is, a relict place name, which would evolve into the Arabic form Laqant, mentioned in the pact of Theodemir (713) and the predecessor of the modern name Alicante. The hypothesis that the municipality of Lucentum was the predecessor of Laqant has been commonly accepted by historians, but archaeologist L. Abad Casal of the University of Alicante (Universitat d'Alacant) notes that this has been brought into question in the light of new evidence uncovered in archaeological excavations and in research by teams from the university and the municipal authorities of Alicante.
Muslim al-Laqant Kūra of Tudmīr
Eventually, the Roman settlement was depopulated, until a new urban demographic concentration developed between the 6th and 7th centuries. Archaeological excavations show that during the early years of the Muslim occupation of Iberia the site at Tossal de Manises was used as a Muslim cemetery, called in Arabic a maqbara (مقبرة), dated to between the 8th and 10th centuries. It seems likely that the Andalusī Laqant was already developed on the other side of the Serra Grossa hill, at the current historic centre of the city, on the foundations of an earlier Hispano-Roman settlement that would have been moved at some point in late antiquity (4th–8th centuries). In that case, the toponym would not be of Arabic origin but of a Romanised Iberian substrate.