LIGHTS, camera, Facebook: Your travel snaps will be dazzling after a night trip to the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the Great Mosque in İstanbul, and Alcalá del Júcar in the province of Albacete.
Wait...where?
Alcalá del Júcar after the sun goes down (photo by the town hall)
You can probably place the first two, and may well have seen them in person, by day or night, and know that when they're lit up after dark, they're just magical. It doesn't have to be Christmas for you to get the same vibe from a scintillating street-scene; any time of year will do, and the stunning, fairytale glow will put you in a randomly festive mood without the stress of last-minute shopping, even on an unremarkable date on the calendar.
If you needed proof, the International Best Artistic Illuminations Award, granted by Philips in 1986, went to the Eiffel Tower, with a second prize to İstanbul's Great Mosque.
Even Nescafé was impressed
Third prize was presented to a location not on any known tourist trail – although it is now, as it's on Spain's extensive 'Most Beautiful Villages' network, which is exactly what you think it is and more.
Alcalá del Júcar, home to barely 1,200 residents, sits in the east of the Castilla-La Mancha province of province of Albacete, about 64 kilometres from the city of the same name, but much closer to the Valencia-province district known as the Ayora-Cofrentes Valley, deep in the rural hinterland of the Comunidad Valenciana and surrounded by dramatic, majestic pine-covered mountains as far as the eye can see.
Alcalá del Júcar is also close to the A-32 motorway, which leads north-east to the well-known wine region of Utiel-Requena (Valencia province), and little more than an hour to Valencia itself, Spain's third-largest city and right on the coast.
From another angle - this time by photographer Pepe Gandia for Turismo de Observación (Turismodeobservacion.com)
But back to the lights. Being the third-most attractively-illuminated location in the world, right up there with Paris' and İstanbul's globally-famous monuments, Alcalá del Júcar suddenly saw a spike in tourist numbers after receiving its award.
Screenshot from Alcalá del Júcar's Nescafé Christmas advert in 1988
So beautiful, in fact, were its lights universally considered to be, that the village was used as the filming location for Nescafé's annual TV Christmas advert in 1988.
That's another feature Paris, İstanbul and Alcalá del Júcar have in common: Coffee. Paris for its iconic pavement cafés – many of which used to be a café-tabac, combining newsagency, tobacconist and coffee shop – İstanbul for Turkish coffee, which is practically always drunk without milk, and Alcalá del Júcar because it's in Spain and Spain is, objectively speaking and in our totally unbiased view, the country where the world's best coffee is served up.
Alcalá del Júcar started to get blasé about awards after a while – just a decade after the Nescafé advert, it was picked out of all 919 of Castilla-La Mancha's municipalities, its 1,200 residents out of the central region's two million, as winner of the Tourism Prize 1998 in recognition of its huge efforts in making itself a place people from elsewhere would want to visit.
What else to see in Alcalá del Júcar
Illuminations aside, the village's prettiest parts are best seen in daylight – like its 18th-century Roman bridge.
Yes, that's right – Roman in style (columns and arches, solid stone), designed to look as near as possible as though it was originally built at the time of this powerful pre-Mediaeval Empire, but constructed in 1771 across the river Júcar, which meanders through the provinces of Albacete and Valencia and which gives this brightly-lit village its name.
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