Big spenders

The news comes as tourism celebrates the figures for 2022, which improve on those of the last year before the pandemic, and pre‐dictions are for an even better result in 2023.

Foreign tourists left the Valencian Com‐munity with more than €6,000 million in its pocket in 2022.

Records confirm the recovery of the sector after the effects of the pandemic surpassed those marked in 2019, the last year of nor‐mality before the outbreak of Covid.

ALICANTE’S Santa Barbara Castle welcomed around a whopping 30,000 visitors over Easter from April 6 until April 10.

Saturday, April 8, was the day when the attendance record was broken, with 9,000 people enjoying the fortress, according to data provided by Esatur.

The international visitors come from the United King‐dom, Italy, France and Ger‐many and the national visi‐tors come from the Valencian Community, Madrid, Catalonia, Galicia and the Basque Country.

The Head of the Alicante City & Beach Tourist Board,

An experimental study by the National Institute of Statistics (INE) reveals that visitors from other coun‐tries spent or withdrew cash with their cred‐it cards for a total amount of €6,750,185,386.

The figure would be even higher if the INE included cash transactions and pocket mon‐ey that tourists bring already changed from their countries of origin. HOSBEC estimates that it would mean more than 55 per cent of the total, which is the percentage of tourist production that corresponds to Alicante within the Valencian Community.