in exchange for gold and the release of pirate prisoners. In this period the town had 18 houses inside the castle walls and some 350 inhabitants. In the 17th century there was an increase in the population which gave rise to the consolidation of Calp.
Towards the mid 18th century several projects arose to build a new fortified wall around the township, because by that point, due to the increase in the population, many inhabitants were forced to live outside the protection of the existing walls. During the 19th century the village developed towards the west. The basic axis of growth was along the route between Altea and Alicante.
During the second half of the 19th century the fishing industry began to take off throughout the region. Buildings such as the Fisherman's Cooperative were constructed and functioned alongside several existing factories dating from the end of the 18th century. These buildings, however, didn’t constitute a nucleus of population dedicated to fishing activities.
In 1918 the El Saladar salt flats were cleaned up and the production of salt could once again take place. Thanks to the technical innovations of the times bigger fishing vessels were constructed. The first small hotels arose in the area surrounding Els banys de la Reina and the Racó Beach, and catered to the emerging middle classes. The summer tourist trade increased substantially with the construction of the Ifach Parador in 1935.
In the period between 1945 and the end of the 1950s many holiday villas and small hotels were built to accommodate the flourishing summer tourist trade. The hotel trade in the region is located almost exclusively on the coastal area. During the second half of the 1960s, as happened along the rest of the Costa Blanca, there was a tremendous boom in construction in Calp. This was due to political change and the emergence of tourism as a phenomenon of the masses
