Jativa will be our next stopping-place. Like most of the towns in this country it is rich in historic interest. Past cottages, embosomed in palm-and orange-trees, you climb up to the hill where the old and new castles stand side by side. Here in 1284 the Infantes de la Cerda, rightful heirs to the throne, were confined by their Uncle Sancho el Bravo. Here too the Duke of Calabria, heir of Naples, languished for ten years after having trusted himself to the honour of Gonzalo de Cordoba, who betrayed him. This was one of the three deeds of which Gonzalo is said to have repented at the last. Indeed the castle of Jativa seems to have greatly troubled his death-bed, for we learn that the second of these three misdeeds was the imprisonment in the same place of the infamous Cæsar Borgia. The Borgias--those super-men of the Renaissance--had their origin in the neighbourhood of Jativa, which also boasts itself the birthplace of the artist Ribera. The smaller coast towns of Alicante attract the weary traveller by their beautifully sounding names: Benidorm, Villajoyosa--what pleasant chords they strike in the imagination! But time is short. You think of them regretfully and hurry towards the capital. But first, if the month is April, you must turn aside for a flying visit to Alcoy, where every year a mediæval joust takes place to the glory of Saint George (the city’s patron saint) and the discomfiture of the Moors. This is to celebrate the taking of the town from the Moors by Jaime el Conqueridor in 1253. Alicante, the largest town in the province of that name, and the second in the Kingdom of Valencia, is as dull as most thriving commercial centres. Its broad white quays are thronged with a busy bustling humanity. Touches of vivid colour in the dress of the women, who are labouring like navvies, a burning sun overhead, and the blue of the Mediterranean, make a not unpleasing picture. Behind the town towers an enormous rock--a second Gibraltar--crowned by the old castle of Santa Barbara. A deep fissure in the rock recalls the stubborn siege of 1707, when the English General and all his garrison were blown to pieces by a mine. Southwards still, to Elche, the City of Palms, or, less poetically, “The Frying-pan!” A mist of heat seems to hang over the little Oriental-looking town. Not even in the palm groves that shut out the desert can you avoid it. These magnificent trees (it has been estimated that there are 80,000 in the belt that encircles the town) provide practically all the palms used by the Christian churches in Passion Week. In the shade of their avenues flourish the laurel, the rose, and the geranium; beyond, extend crops of lucerne and wheat, watered by the carefully regulated Vinalapo.