'GOLDEN' AIRPORT
ALICANTE-Elche airport celebrated its 50th anniversary yesterday (Thursday) and is now Spain’s fifth busiest airport.
The first flight to land at Alicante airport was an Aviaco Corvier Metropolitan on May 4, 1967. The plane had taken off from Madrid 90 minutes earlier – almost twice the amount of time Madrid-Alicante flights take today. That flight was welcomed by the then ‘Minister of Air’ José Lacalle, and in that first year it was taken by 80,677 passengers.
Alicante airport has been the gateway for the Costa Blanca tourism boom for decades. Before it opened, holidaymakers landed in Valencia and then took a rather long coach trip to Benidorm – where the boom was beginning.
Alicante had the Rabasa military airfield, but it was practically unusable for commercial airlines, mainly because of the buildings surrounding it. The airport’s current location was actually one of the oldest civilian landing strips in Spain – French company Lignes Ae- riennes Latécoère used it as a stopover for flights heading to Dakar (Senegal) and it was later used by Aeropostale – which eventually became Air France.
Although called Alicante airport at the time, the land is in fact part of Elche municipality, which is why a replica of the Dama de Elche bust has always been present. For this reason, the official name of the airport was changed to Alicante-Elche airport several years ago.
Over the years, the airport has been upgraded many times to cope with increasing demand. A charter flights terminal was built in 1972 and a second terminal was constructed in 1996 – alongside what is today the old terminal building.
In 2007, building started on today’s modern facility designed by Bruce Fairbanks, which was officially opened in the spring of 2011 and cost €570 million - including improvements to the landing strip, aircraft parking area and other facilities.
Today’s Alicante-Elche airport can handle up to 20 million passengers per year – this year’s estimate is for 13 million – with 42 gates, 148 check-in desks and 25 luggage carrousels. The only pending matter is a suitable train or Tram link, for which the terminal already has a designated area.