History

The toponym Canet comes from the Latin Cannetum which means cane field: the marshy area that stretched from Puzol to Almenara with an abundance of reed beds.

On October 3, 1237 Jaime I in the Llibre del Repartiment de Vàlencia gives an extension of land to the convent of Benifassà. The first owners of the territory during feudalism were Pere Rubí, Arnau Joan and Francesc Berenguer. According to the historian G. Escolano, being lord D. Valterra Blanes de Berenguer in the sixteenth century, the place was walled and contained 45 houses of old Christians, housing a company of knights who guarded the coast.

Since the thirteenth century it has had a stable population always dedicated to agriculture and organized in a feudal manor until the nineteenth century. Francisco Berenguer, a notary from Saguntino, in 1420 linked the town to his descendants, turning it into a lordship governed by important Valencian noble families, such as the Vallterra and later the Saavedra, until the feudal regime disappeared in Spain in the 1830s.

The toponym Canet comes from the Latin Cannetum which means cane field: the marshy area that stretched from Puzol to Almenara with an abundance of reed beds.

On October 3, 1237 Jaime I in the Llibre del Repartiment de Vàlencia gives an extension of land to the convent of Benifassà. The first owners of the territory during feudalism were Pere Rubí, Arnau Joan and Francesc Berenguer. According to the historian G. Escolano, being lord D. Valterra Blanes de Berenguer in the sixteenth century, the place was walled and contained 45 houses of old Christians, housing a company of knights who guarded the coast.

Since the thirteenth century it has had a stable population always dedicated to agriculture and organized in a feudal manor until the nineteenth century. Francisco Berenguer, a notary from Saguntino, in 1420 linked the town to his descendants, turning it into a lordship governed by important Valencian noble families, such as the Vallterra and later the Saavedra, until the feudal regime disappeared in Spain in the 1830s.

During the contemporary period Canet has seen its economy and its physiognomy change. Dedicated to export agriculture, first of vineyards and already in the twentieth century of citrus, becomes at the end of the same century in an eminently tourist town. The artistic-architectural heritage of our town is made up of the parish church of San Pedro built in the 18th century, the Saavedra Palace from the 19th century, the lighthouse built in 1904, 30 meters high and with a range of 25 miles, whose main feature is that it is located 300 meters inland; It occupies the place where an old watchtower was located in the 16th century, whose mission was to alert the coastal populations of the presence of corsair ships; and finally, we must mention the recent inauguration of our Ethnological Museum, installed in an old country house.