It is usual that people (and we are no exception) travel thousands of miles for holidays but never visit a village round the corner. So once in a while we try to fix this and during the weekends we get out to check what surrounds as.
This time it was a day in Santa Pola (a village some 20km away from Alicante). First stop is Santa Pola aquarium. It is not a big and flashy aquarium boasting the biggest fish tank or the largest whale. It is quite small municipal aquarium featuring marine life from a local coast, but it is still entertaining for kids and the price is good (3 euros adult ticket and 1.5 euros for kids). After spending an hour or so in the aquarium you may visit the castle and its maritime museum. It seems to be another interesting stop in Santa Pola, but we have missed it as it closed for lunch (we left the home in the morning too late).
On the way to the Salt museum you shall stop at McDonalds. Not so much because the kids love it and you can’t do a lot about it, but because they offer discount coupons for Pola Park. After lunch we visited Salt museum, which has a free en
trance and is located in the former salt factory. It has (obviously) lots of salt in big and small pieces and kids loved to touch it and to check out various factory equipment. There are also several binoculars to look at flamingos fishing in surrounding salt pools and some of them can be seen up close in the pond outside the museum’s entrance.
Finally we reached the highlight of the day – Pola Park. It is an amusement park which is big enough to be entertaining even for adults, but not that big and expensive as ‘proper’ theme parks. With McDonalds coupon you will get a bracelet that differs depending on the age of the kid (2-4 or 5-7 or 8-17 or adult) and they are allowed
(or not) on the ride depending on the category of the bracelet. Thus it may make sense to round up the age to a higher category to avoid disappointment that your ‘almost 8 year old’ is not allowed to go on, e.g. go carts. It may also allow you to escape the necessity to accompany the kids on the rides as on some rides the younger ones need to be accompanied by an adult. While the park has a lot of different rides, including huge slides, a rollercoaster, trampolines, horror room, etc, it is mostly amusing for the boys since they can go on quads, go carts and spend hours on electric bumper cars (our boys were always on the move making it impossible to make a photo:).
By the way – ‘mola’ is Spanish for defining something cool, something that ‘rocks’.