The Provincial Council of Alicante, through the MARQ, Archaeological Museum of Alicante, promotes during the month of August the 18th edition of the excavation plan of Pobla d'Ifach, which takes place in the natural park of Peñón d'Ifach in Calpe. Directed by José Luis Ménendez Fueyo, MARQ's Exhibitions technician and PhD in History from the University of Alicante, together with a group of twelve volunteers, students of Archaeology, History, Art History and Restoration from the universities of Valencia and Alicante.
Initiated in 2005, this archaeological research work has the collaboration of Calpe Town Council and the Regional Ministry of the Environment, Water, Infrastructures and Territory. In the current edition, work is planned on the "Gateway to the West". from the site of Pobla d'Ifach, found in last year's excavation campaign, in which the technicians brought to light its collapsed arch and which is now going to be fully excavated and documented.
These actions on our medieval heritage are, at present, one of the most solid references we have for the study of the formation of our Alicante and Valencian territory in this historical period and also have the support of the Architecture area of the Diputación de Alicante, in the drafting and monitoring of preventive conservation projects that it carries out on various sites in our province, such as the Pobla d'Ifach in Calpe.
The call "castrum of Calp"The area that currently includes the municipality of Calpe turned out to be a strategic territory where settlers from the north of the peninsula, specifically from Catalonia and Aragon, settled and repopulated the area, thus configuring the current urban and territorial structure. Thus, municipalities close to Pobla d'Ifach such as Benidorm, La Vila Joiosa, Xàbia, Dénia or Calpe welcomed an important number of settlers. La Pobla d'Ifach was built to concentrate the displaced population and to structure this new conquered territory, being founded between the end of the 13th century and the first decades of the 14th century, although it had a very short life, as it was abandoned at the beginning of the 15th century and left in ruins, an issue that has favoured and allowed its current study. The first archaeological research was carried out in 2005 at the access gates to the Pobla, the so-called North GateThe complex system of access with three gates, a guard tower, a security chamber and a customs house was the main entrance to the urban enclave.
Next to this North GateThe large church of Madona Santa Maria, with its bell tower and a very unique civil building, identified as a domus or residence of the members of the Lauria House and their representatives. A stately building in which the family of Roger de Lauria, Italian admiral and first Count of Cocentaina, among other titles, who served under Peter III and James II of Aragon between the 13th and 14th centuries, lived.
Throughout its history, the MARQ has hosted exhibitions of pieces discovered at the Pobla d'Ifach archaeological site in Calpe, such as "The Knight of Ifach", "The Pillars of the Kingdom" on the Gothic capital of the Pobla and, in 2009, "Calpe. Archaeology and Museum" in which the archaeological discoveries of the Pobla d'Ifach were shown to the public for the first time.
