Benicarló is, in its own description, an immense garden. Irrigation dominates the flat coastal plain, and the fields yield lettuces, tomatoes, citrus, beets and olives, but it is the artichoke, Cynara scolymus, that made the town's name. Cultivated here under a protected Designation of Origin, the Benicarló artichoke is a mark of quality that turns a humble thistle into something worth guarding. The sea provides the other half of the larder. A fishing fleet of more than fifty boats lands well over a million kilograms a year, hake and octopus, monkfish, swordfish and prawns, hauled into a port that still organises much of local life around the daily catch. The artichoke even has its own winter festival, held when the crop is at its best, the town turning out to cook it, eat it and crown it the star of the season, proof that a place can build genuine civic pride around something as unassuming as a thistle.

The town's name is a relic of its Muslim past. Present-day Benicarló grew from an Arab farmhouse recorded as Beni-Gazló or Bani-Gazlún, a small walled hamlet with a watchtower and a place for prayer, its fields watered by wells in the way the Arab settlers had perfected. It lived under the protection of the castle at Peníscola, and it suffered for that connection. Around 1225, during an early attempt by James I of Aragon to take the fortress, the hamlet was emptied of its people; the king himself is said to have spent a night there during the siege. On 14 June 1236 it passed for good into Christian hands, its charter granted to thirty settlers, and later it belonged in turn to the Knights Templar and the Order of Montesa.

Long before the Arabs or the Christians, this was Iberian country. On the hill of Puig de la Nau, at the edge of town, stood one of the most important Iberian settlements in the whole Valencian Community, occupied in phases between roughly 700 and 400 BC and reaching its height in the fifth and fourth centuries. What the excavators pulled from it is remarkable for such a place: fine imported Greek pottery, including an Attic drinking cup attributed to the Penthesilea painter around 460 to 450 BC, and a hoard of ornamental objects the locals call the tresoret. Off the coast, at the mouth of a dry riverbed, lies a submerged site thought to be the ancient port. These people traded with Greeks and Carthaginians across the same sea the fishing fleet works today.

Benicarló's fortunes have risen and fallen with its harvests and its wars. In the 19th century a strong red known as Carlon wine was shipped from here to Argentina, France and England, and demand grew so fierce that a company was formed in 1883 to build a proper port for the trade. Then the vine louse phylloxera arrived and destroyed the vineyards, and the boom collapsed; the port was not finally completed until 1931 to 1944. War, too, left its marks. The town was raided by Turkish corsairs in 1556, surrendered in the War of the Spanish Succession in 1706, when its medieval walls were pulled down, and was bombed from the air during the Spanish Civil War. There is a quiet symmetry in what became of those dismantled walls: their stones were reused to raise the great 18th-century Church of Saint Bartholomew, whose slender octagonal bell tower still presides over the town, defence turned into devotion.