Els Magazinos Dénia: Royal Coaches, Raisins, Toys and Today’s Food Hall

Hola Terrace Crew ☀️🍷

Pull up a lounger. If you’ve been to Dénia and only used Els Magazinos as “the place with the stalls and the castle view,” you’ve walked through four hundred years without noticing.

This is the version I wish someone had handed me the first time I sat under those arches with a cold drink.

Where you actually are

Els Magazinos sits in Baix la Mar — the old sailors’ quarter by the port, down Carrer Pont, not up by the town hall. Fishermen, warehouses, the smell of the dock. The pretty postcard of Dénia is the castle. This street was the working bit.

The king who never quite came back

In 1617–18, when the Duke of Lerma was lord of Dénia, and Felipe III had already visited the town, a wide stone building went up here as royal cocheras, space for the court’s carriages. The stone, the town archaeologist Josep Gisbert and later researchers have said, came by sea from Jávea. The arches you can still see are of that date. They were meant to impress. The next grand royal stay didn’t unfold as planned. The coaches stayed a story. The building stayed.

By the mid-1600s, it was already doing something more: Dénia: customs, stores for the galleys, goods coming off the boats.

Why it’s called Magazinos

Not a branding meeting. French military maps from the War of Succession marked the port stores as magazins. In Valencian, that’s magatzem, warehouse. The name stuck to the strip. When the Cervera family opened the food market, they didn’t invent a pretty word. They put the old one back on the door.

Raisins, then a town that tried to leave

In the 1800s, this whole waterfront lived off pansa — moscatel raisins packed for export, a lot of it towards Britain. The street filled with stores. Baix la Mar got rich enough, and annoyed enough with the rest of Dénia, that in 1837 forty sailors asked Alicante’s Diputación to let the quarter become its own municipality: Diana. The Diputación said yes on paper. Dénia ignored it and kept the tax base. Classic.

When the raisins faded, the toys moved in.

Dénia’s next industry walked into the empty warehouses: juguetes. Germans who’d been in the raisin trade started tin toys up the road in 1904. On Carrer Pont, this building’s long run was José Monllor Linares, from 1924 to 1954,  wood toys, more than a thousand references in a 1948 catalogue, scooters to skittles. Local and press histories of the building say that in 1947 he held a Disney licence to reproduce Mickey, Pluto and Snow White figures in wood. Before that he’d already done Hollywood faces. Laurel and Hardy turned up as a bowling set.

The stalls you eat at now follow the old workshop bays down the central aisle. That’s not décor. That’s the factory layout they kept.

Then it went quiet. Decades of dust.

2019: the family who bought a ruin

Federico Cervera and family,  four generations of Dénia kitchens, the people behind places like Casa Federico, took the wreck on. Works started around April 2018. Gisbert came in when the arches showed themselves to be a century older than the toy factory everyone remembered. After a wet Easter delayed the last stretch, Els Magazinos opened on 29 April 2019: more than 2,000 square metres, a couple of dozen stalls, terraces towards the castle, Les Cuinetes in the old kitchen-toy corner, culture in the lonja.

It isn’t a museum with a ticket. It’s a working market that happens to be sitting on a royal coach house.

Next time you Visit

Go for the building first. Look up. Then eat. Saturday is livelier. If you only want one plate and a drink, that’s fine; that’s what the place is for. Pair it with a wander through Baix la Mar before the cruise-day rush, or with Dénia’s rice and coca weeks if you catch them.

It’s not “a food hall they built in 2019.” It’s the port, the raisins, the toys and the kitchens stacked in the same stones.

If you’ve got a Monllor toy in a box at home, or you remember the street before the market, tell me. I like the versions that aren’t on the wall.

Joanne xx

Sun Sea Sangria

For opening times and more information: https://elsmagazinos.com/

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