Behind the Costa Blanca's hotel towers there is a quite different country, dry, stony and mostly empty, and the Arroyo de Martín Pérez belongs to it. An arroyo is a gully that stays dry for most of the year, and here, on the hills inland from El Campello and San Juan de Alicante, it carries the water away when the rains arrive. Those rains, when they come, come hard. Autumn storms on this coast can drop a month's water in a few hours, and the gullies fill suddenly, so check the forecast before you go poking about dry beds.
The shelter here is one of the many small rock-painting sites of the Alicante hills, part of the Levantine art tradition that UNESCO lists as the Rock Art of the Mediterranean Basin on the Iberian Peninsula. The paintings are generally small, red and faded, and were made by hunter-gatherer and early farming people many thousands of years ago. The ride also touches the Palmeral of Elche, a huge grove of date palms laid out under Moorish rule and now itself a World Heritage site, which is a lovely contrast with the bare limestone.
The land around is carob, almond and pine on thin red soil, with Mediterranean scrub that smells of thyme when the sun is on it. Looking inland, the long blue wall of the Sierra de Aitana stands over everything, the highest summit in the province of Alicante. Looking the other way, you may catch the glint of the sea.
Riding here is easy to get wrong because the area is busy. El Campello, Mutxamel and San Juan de Alicante all have over twenty thousand people, so the roads near them are lined with roundabouts, villas and delivery vans, and traffic can be heavy at weekends. Once you turn off onto the minor roads into the hills, it quietens down at once, with tight bends and patchy tarmac. Early morning is by far the best time, partly for the light and partly because midday in summer is brutally hot.
Fuel is no problem here, with stations on every main road around the three towns. The coast, with its beaches and cheap cafes, is only a few minutes away, which makes this a good half-day.