Last year’s unquestionable success convinced the International Cycling Union. Benidorm repeats this weekend as the venue for the Cyclo-Cross World Cup, the most important and prestigious of all the tournaments that make up the calendar of the winter specialty of cycling. The penultimate round of its 2023-2024 edition will be held in the Alicante town this Sunday, January 21, 2024.
From the Hosbec hotel association, it is recalled that “facing seasonality is one of the purposes of 2024, for this reason it is vital to bet, in the hardest part of the low season, on product diversification or the celebration of events that act as a draw for tourists”.
In the first half of January, destinations such as Benidorm and Calp have reached a hotel occupancy of 65% and 66%, respectively. It should be noted that Benidorm keeps close to 80% of its hotels open, which translates into more than 29,000 beds available in the first month of the year.
For the Minister of Tourism, Nuria Montes, “that the UCI Cyclocross World Cup has once again chosen Benidorm to host one of its events is not only a sporting success, but also a tourist success.” Last year, thanks to the more than 15,000 visitors that the competition attracted, Benidorm raised its occupancy rates in the middle of the low season, “precisely due to the celebration of this World Cup, which was attended by a large number of international audiences at levels never seen during a month of January,” he says.
Before this test was held, the Costa Blanca was already a reference for the international cycling peloton, a space that combines a mild winter climate with a varied orography, with 13 mountain passes, so a dozen teams of different nationalities , as renowned as Movistar, Intermarché or Astana, carry out their winter preparation in the province of Alicante.
A small town, like La Nucía, with a population of barely 20,000 inhabitants, close to Benidorm, has made a large investment in sports facilities in recent years that has made it worthy of national and European awards. Its Camilo Cano Sports City boasts more than 80 sports facilities where you can practice more than a hundred sports. Tennis player David Ferrer chose La Nucia to locate his tennis academy.
A few months ago, for example, the “Qatar Sports Club” soccer team, in which the Spanish world champion and former Athletic Club and Bayern Munich player Javi Martínez plays, held a five-day stage there to prepare for the 2023-2024 season.
Before the last World Cup in Qatar, the Saudi Arabia team was concentrated in the south of the province, in the facilities of La Finca Resort, a luxury tourist complex located in Algorfa, in the Vega Baja region; a five-star hotel that offers its clients the possibility of playing golf, cycling, tennis or paddle tennis in its own facilities, which include soccer fields.
European teams such as Shalke 04, from the Bundesliga, or the English Southhampton and Middlesbrough have chosen Benidorm, as well as Russian and Scandinavian teams have held winter camps in the area.
The king of Olympic sports, athletics, also finds in Alicante an ideal place to practice it. Torrevieja and La Nucía are the municipalities that receive the greatest number of international athletes. Athletes from the Estonian national team prepared in Torrevieja for the Tokyo Games. And part of the United Kingdom Paralympic team trained in Sant Joan d’Alacant.
Precisely, this Sunday Santa Pola will kick off the 32nd edition of its popular Mitja Marató Internacional, one of the most prestigious events in Spain, the largest in the province of Alicante and the second in the Valencian Community, only surpassed by that of Valencia. The more than 5,500 registered athletes – among whom the president of the Generalitat Valenciana, Carlos Mazón, is expected to participate – will travel along the sea, for 21 kilometers, along the entire coast of Santa Pola, from Las Salinas to Santa Pola del Este.
The president of the Santa Pola Athletics Club highlighted in the presentation of the event “the presence of more than 400 foreign athletes who take advantage of the proximity to the airport to run here; This is a record in our average.”
So far there are 91 runners registered from the United Kingdom, 73 from Norway, 39 from Poland, 25 from France, 24 from Ireland, 23 from Sweden or 20 from Belgium, reaching a total of 23 nationalities. Among the Spaniards, 2,692 from Alicante, 752 from Murcia and 451 from Albacete stand out.
