The Hotel Sevilla, the first hotel
Many people think the Hotel Jeremías was Alcocéber's first hotel, but it wasn't. According to residents' accounts gathered by local historians, the first was the Hotel Sevilla, built around 1920. It was a meeting place for the well-to-do families who spent their summers on the coast, with dances, games and celebrations, alongside other villas of the period such as Villa García Petit and the Marquis's house.
During the Spanish Civil War a shell destroyed the building. It was later rebuilt as Villa Montse and, over the years, its plot ended up occupied by the Cortés apartments, behind Arenal beach.
A summer hamlet
In the mid-1920s Alcocéber had little more than two hundred inhabitants and a railway siding, and provincial guidebooks described it as a summer retreat for "distinguished families". As late as 1951, a guide to the beaches of Castellón listed no hotel in Alcocéber at all, only a bar-restaurant. Tourism as we know it had not yet arrived.
Take-off in the sixties
The big change came with the tourism boom of the sixties and seventies. The first housing developments and seafront residences opened, such as the old Residencia Alcocebre (now the Hotel Alcossebre), and little by little Cargador beach filled with hotels, apartments and holidaymakers from Aragon, Madrid, Catalonia and the Basque Country. The Hotel Jeremías was one of the establishments that went hand in hand with that transformation.
In 1997 the village officially became Alcossebre, and that same year one of the coast's large hotels opened in Las Fuentes. Since then, Alcossebre has grown without losing its village scale, protected to the north by the Serra d'Irta Natural Park, declared in 2002.
Alcocéber today
Today Alcossebre has around 2,000 year-round residents and more than ten kilometres of coastline. Cargador beach has flown the Blue Flag every year since 1987, and the Sierra de Irta protects twelve kilometres of undeveloped coastline, one of the last stretches like it on the Valencian coast. To find out more about the area, see the information on the Serra d'Irta Natural Park or the Alcossebre tourism website.