The city of Alcoi has a long industrial tradition. Its inland location, in a very broken terrain, used to be a major drawback in terms of taking the city’s products to market. To solve this problem a narrow gauge railway was laid to connect Alcoi with the port of Gandía and the broad gauge railway at the distant city of Villena. But the Alcoyans had more ambitious plans and set their sights on a broad gauge railway, with a greater carrying capacity, to link up with Alicante, a more important port than the modest facility at Grao de Gandía.

Thus, under the auspices of the Guadalhorce Railway Plan, during the dictatorship of General Primo de Rivera, a series of spectacular engineering works went into the creation of 66 km of railway infrastructure which made use of every engineering resource available at the time. The civil war and post-war hardships intervened and halted the project before any tracks had been laid and without a single train having been run, and the railway was consigned to oblivion among these Alicante mountains.