What you can see on the Cap Blanch webcam
Because it is live video, the scene moves: walkers and cyclists on the promenade, people swimming off the shingle, the parasols and loungers on the beach and the surface of the sea. It answers three quick questions before heading down: how calm and clear the water is, how full the beach has become and whether the sky over the mountain is clear.
Altea beach webcam: Cap Blanch
At Cap Blanch, where Altea's coastline meets L'Albir, this live camera looks out from a campsite beside the coast road. Below it run the road and a wide tiled promenade with palm trees; then comes a strip of sand with beach-football goals, and on the shingle a row of thatched parasols, sunloungers and a lifeguard chair. Straight ahead is open sea, and on the right the rocky foot of the Serra Gelada drops into the water.
Because it is live video, you can watch walkers on the promenade, swimmers in the shallows and how much the water is moving. The beach here is pebble and shingle, and the sea is usually clear and calm.
Altea's longest beach
Cap Blanch is the longest beach in the municipality of Altea. It runs south from the Club Náutico, the town's yacht club and marina, to the point where the shore passes into L'Alfàs del Pi and becomes Albir beach; the campsite with the camera stands on the Altea side, just short of that boundary. The beach is gravel and rounded cobbles rather than sand. The Altea webcam looks out from the promenade in the town centre, further north.
Below the Serra Gelada
The cliffs on the right of the picture belong to the Serra Gelada, a ridge nearly 4 miles (6 km) long that separates this bay from Benidorm. Its seaward face drops more than 300 m (1,000 ft) into the Mediterranean, and since 2005 the ridge and the sea around it have been a natural park shared by Benidorm, L'Alfàs del Pi and Altea. Underwater, the park protects meadows of Posidonia seagrass, and it is the second most important area for seabirds in the Valencian Community after the Columbretes Islands, with shags, storm petrels and Audouin's gulls, and peregrine falcons on the cliffs.
When to watch Cap Blanch
Spain is one hour ahead of the UK and Ireland. The shore here faces south-east, so on clear mornings the camera looks towards the rising sun and the first images of the day can be bright and hazy. In the afternoon the light comes from behind, and the colour of the sea is easier to judge.
Getting to Cap Blanch
The beach lies along the coast road from Altea to Albir, nearly 2 miles (3 km) south of Altea's old town, with a seafront promenade alongside: you can walk from the Club Náutico into Albir and on to the start of the lighthouse path at the far end of its promenade. Alicante airport lies some 34 miles (54 km) to the south-west as the crow flies, and Benidorm is just beyond the Serra Gelada. Across the boundary, the same campsite streams a second view, south-west along Albir beach towards the ridge, on the Albir webcam page.
