The most striking of door knockers in the Old Town are ones pictured above. The form is nearly always the same – a hand, cast in iron or brass, holding a ball or ring. The ‘ball in hand’. You see it repeated street after street in every state of preservation, from recently polished brass to iron worn almost past recognition by three or four centuries of use.
What’s worth looking at is the variation within that consistency. The quality of the casting. The decorative backplates – some plain, some elaborate, some bearing crests or religious motifs. The difference between a working family’s entrance and a merchant’s door is visible in the weight and finish of the knocker alone.
Some are original to the building. Some are later additions. A few are outright replacements that don’t belong to the period at all which tells you something about how attitudes to the Old Town have shifted over time. Not everyone who restored a door thought to find an appropriate knocker.
The wooden doors they’re mounted on are as much part of the picture as the knockers themselves. The grain, the ironwork hinges, the wear around the handle where hands have reached for the same spot for generations.
The ball in hand is not unique to Jávea, it runs across the Marina Alta and much of the Valencian coast. But the concentration here, on streets this old and this intact, makes the Old Town one of the best places on the coast to see the full range in one walk.
The doors themselves are documented in the Doors section. The stone surrounds that frame them are in Stone.
