Altea is amazing.

Benidorm is appalling.

Altea is a few blocks of 19th-century charm crowned by a 115-year-old church atop a hill.

Benidorm is miles of urban sprawl built around “the most high-rise buildings per capita in the world”.

And the amazing thing about this … is that these two cities are about five miles apart.

To be sure, Benidorm is the exception here.

When most of us think of appealing Mediterranean beach towns, we think of something compact and quaint. A white-washed town with real people living real lives beyond the “high months” of July and August.

That is Altea (above).

Then there is Benidorm (below).

The city burghers there took a very different approach to development. They embraced it, they hurried it, and it led to a sort of Dubai on the Mediterranean with less charm. With towers that can be seen from miles away but seem out of place whether seen from near or from far.

Benidorm, a city of 70,000, has 27 skyscrapers of at least 30 stories and 100 meters (328 feet) in height.

Benidorm took the coastal dream and turned it into the big-city nightmare.

We were not aware of the place before arriving to Altea, and references to the disaster that is Benidorm were made by various locals.

The juxtaposition of one against the other is startling.

Today, we took the drive to Benidorm and went down to the beach there and found the overall ambience of the place to be oppressive and depressing.

Who builds towers where a beach town ought to be? It’s unnatural. Freakish.

The towers, however, accommodate lots of tourists, and Benidorm is considered by some to be Ground Zero for the “package tour” phenomenon, beginning in the 1980s.

In 1990, a correspondent for England’s Sunday Times wrote: “These days you just have to look at the numbers of wide-bodied jets bearing wide-bodied holidaymakers to Benidorm to realize that package holidays and airborne cattle trucks make fun in the sun accessible to everyone.”

Benidrom became known for “lager louts” — most of them binge-drinking young Britons, a situation allegedly improved in recent years.

But clearing the streets of drunks does not solve the issues of a down-market, mass-appeal vacation based at one of those “what are they doing here?” towers.

Altea, and most of the rest of the Mediterranean’s coastal cities, didn’t give up their souls to bring in tourists (five million a year in Benidorm, reportedly) and remain deeply appealing. Altea certainly is one of them.

It is very strange to be so cheerful in one, a vacation on a human scale, and so easily oppressed by the other — just a 10-minute drive away.