Alicante-Elche Miguel Hernández Airport

Alicante-Elche Miguel Hernández is Spain's sixth-busiest airport and the Costa Blanca's sole major gateway, handling a record 18.4M passengers (2024). Like Málaga 500 km to the southwest, ALC operates as a seasonally intense leisure-market hub — but with a more pronounced British skew: UK-originating traffic represents roughly 40% of all passengers, a share that surpasses every other Mediterranean airport outside Faro. The surge reflects long-standing British homeownership along the Costa Blanca (Benidorm, Torrevieja, Jávea) and year-round retiree residency flows. Ryanair operates the largest base at ALC with a fleet of over 15 aircraft permanently stationed on site. easyJet, Jet2, TUI, Vueling, Iberia, Norwegian, Wizz Air, and Eurowings account for the remainder of the seat-capacity top ten. No flag carrier anchors a hub operation; no widebody scheduled service exists. Across 49 airlines the airport serves 143 destinations on 284 scheduled routes, with the UK alone accounting for 35+ city pairs — one of the highest UK city-count totals of any non-British airport. A single 9,842 ft (3,000 m) asphalt runway 10/28 handles all operations — one of the busiest single-runway airports in Western Europe, regularly exceeding 30 movements per hour during summer peaks. Terminal NAT (New Terminal), opened 2011 on a 333,500 sq m (3.59M sq ft) footprint, consolidated all operations into a single building with 90 check-in counters, 20 jet bridges, and an expansive 23,700 sq m (255,000 sq ft) retail zone optimized for the leisure market's high duty-free propensity. Capacity is rated at 20M passengers — already approaching saturation, with Aena's expansion master plan adding a parallel taxiway and second runway study by 2030. Elevation is 142 ft (43 m); the airport sits on 900 hectares between Alicante and Elche.