Elche, Elche, Elche...

12 Nov 2011

Since I'm planning two bigger trips at the beginning of December, I've decided to take some smaller day trips around the city of Alicante. Today's trip was to Elche (or Elx in valenciano).

Elche is best known for two things: its shoes and its palm trees.

Near Elche, there are countless shoe factories--making it the main supplier for shoes in Spain as well as parts of the rest of Europe. According to urban legend (so who knows whether this is true or not), one of the shoe factories in Elche was shut down. People came to the factory at night and stole the shoe-making machines. They began to make shoes out of their houses and sell them on an underground market.

We didn't visit the shoe outlets on this particular trip. When we reach Elche, we discovered that you can't really take a bus out there (it would require a number of bus changes), and that the best way is to go in a car. We're planning a trip to go to the shoe outlets, but for today we explored Elche's sights and did a little shopping.

Elche is also home to one of UNESCO's World Heritage Sites--El Palmeral de Elche (Palm Tree Grove)! This grove has over 200,000 palm trees!

Elche has come up in our visits to various archaeology museums. In the museum in Alicante, they have the famous Dama de Elche--the Lady of Elche. This figure was found by archaeologists around the turn of the 19th century. I guess the Romans who abandoned Lucentum (the Roman ruins by my school) and moved on to Elche--possibly for better trade routes. Archaeologists believe that the figure may be for worship of the Roman goddess Tanit. I haven't actually gotten to see the figure in person because when we visited the museum in Alicante the figure was in Elche's archaeology museum. It's now back at Alicante's museum--so I'll definitely check it out the next time I go to the archaeology museum!