The castle of Santa Bárbara is a castle located in the centre of the Spanish city of Alicante, on the Benacantil mountain, a rocky mass of 167 m of altitude bordering the sea, which gave it an enormous strategic value since from it you can see the entire bay of Alicante and its land surroundings. The image of the mountain from the beach resembles a face, which is why it is known as "the face of the Moor" and is an icon of the city of Alicante.
Some historians date the origin of the toponym to the words bena, an Arabic transcription of pinna, Latin for 'rock', and laqanti, an adjective that comes from Laqant, Alicante for the Arabs.
Archaeological remains from the Bronze Age, Iberian and Roman times have been found on its slopes, although the origin of the current fortress is to be found at the end of the 9th century with the Muslim domination.
The castle was given the name of Santa Bárbara because on her feast day, 4 December 1248, it was taken from the Arabs by the prince Alfonso of Castile, the future King Alfonso X the Wise. After stiff resistance from its governor, Nicolás Peris, in 1296 James II took possession of the entire enclosure for the Crown of Aragon and ordered it to be remodelled. Almost a century later, Peter IV the Ceremonious ordered the enclosure to be rectified and King Charles I ordered it to be fortified at the beginning of the 16th century.
It was not until the reign of Philip II that the great reform of the castle took place, with the appointment as mayor of the castle of Juan Coloma y Cardona, who promoted the construction of the buildings most of which can be seen today. The works lasted from 1562 to 1580, according to projects by Juan Bautista Antonelli and Giacomo Palearo "el Fratín". The bombardments that Alicante suffered in 1691 by the French squadron and the military actions carried out against the castle during the period 1706-1709, during the War of Succession, when it was in the hands of the English, seriously affected the entire enclosure, which suffered the last military action in 1873 when the armoured frigate "Numancia", in the hands of cantonalist rebels from Cartagena, launched its shells at the town and its castle, which would be dismantled twenty years later.
On 28th January 1844, during the Boné Rebellion of Colonel Pantaleón Boné, it was occupied by liberal forces opposed to the policies of General Espartero. Juan Martín "El Empecinado", a military friend of Boné, betrayed his trust by handing the castle over to Espartero's forces, who crushed the revolt by shooting Boné and all his supporters in the Malecón of the port, later erecting the Monument to the Martyrs of Liberty on that very spot.
During the Spanish Civil War, it was used to hold prisoners who supported the Nationalist side, and later prisoners who supported the Second Republic, most of whom came from the port of Alicante and the Los Almendros concentration camp. The marks and engravings of those prisoners can still be seen today in some areas of the castle. It was used as a Francoist concentration camp until the end of 1939.
Until 1963, when it was opened to the public, it was abandoned. It was in that year when the two lifts were inaugurated, which go 142.70 metres inside the mountain and are accessed through a 204.83 m long tunnel that starts in the Avenida de Jovellanos, opposite the Postiguet beach.