Alicante · Nightlife

The lanes behind the town hall, around Calle Labradores and the small plazas off it, hold most of the city's bars within a few hundred metres, so bar-hopping on foot is the default. Busiest Thursday to Saturday, and most nights in August; residents' noise rules mean the terraces pack up well before the indoor rooms do.

A concert hall that becomes a club: touring bands earlier in the evening, then DJ nights running from about 3:30am on Fridays and Saturdays. This is the standard answer to what you do once the old-town bars have closed.

The bars and clubs along the harbour breakwater run later than the old town and skew louder and younger. It is about a ten-minute walk from the Explanada, which makes it the easy second stop of the night rather than a destination in itself.

From June to September a good part of the going-out moves several kilometres north to the beach strip at San Juan, where the seafront bars run into the small hours. The TRAM stops running long before they close, so factor a taxi back into the cost of the evening.

Alicante's biggest night of the year is 24 June, when the wooden monuments built around the city are burned and the centre stays out until dawn. The days leading up to it are given over to street parties and a daily lunchtime mascletà firework barrage in Plaza de los Luceros; if you are in town in late June this replaces whatever else you had planned.