The airport is inside Elche. Not Alicante — Elche. Alicante–Elche Miguel Hernández sits between the El Altet and Torrellano pedanías, inside this municipality, and in 2024 it moved 18.4 million passengers. A good share of them land late, pick up a hire car, and drive twenty minutes to a property they have not seen since last summer.
Which is where the key safe comes in.
Why it picks tonight
A key safe on a coastal wall has spent months doing nothing, in air coming off 2,469 hectares of working salt pans across the Elche and Santa Pola municipalities, with fine sand blowing in off nine kilometres of dune-backed beach. Mechanically it is a small combination lock bolted outdoors in one of the harder environments you could pick for one. It does not fail because you arrived; it failed some weeks ago and you are the first person to find out.
Work through this before ringing anyone
Check the code is the code. More of these calls than you would believe end with the owner confirming it was changed in April and the message never got forwarded. Ring or message whoever gave it to you before you assume the box is broken.
Dial it slowly, twice. Worn buttons and stiff dials skip. Go one digit at a time, deliberately, and do the whole sequence twice before deciding it is not working.
Push the shackle in first, then release. A great many push-button safes need the mechanism resetting before they will accept an entry at all. If you have been entering a code onto a box that was never cleared, you have been feeding it nonsense.
Try it with the torch on. Not as obvious as it sounds at eleven at night on an unlit wall, and plenty of people are entering a five where they mean a six.
Then stop. Repeatedly forcing a stiff dial is how the mechanism goes from sticky to seized, and how a solvable evening becomes a drilled box.
If none of that works
You have two problems, and only one of them is the safe. The first is that you cannot get into the property tonight. The second is that a key safe which has failed once has told you something about its condition, and it will do it again in February when nobody is there at all.
Deal with the first by ringing. Deal with the second before you fly home.
The thing worth doing next year
If you own the property rather than renting it, the sensible move is not a better key safe — it is having somebody local check the door, the lock and the box at the start of the season, while the place is empty and nothing is urgent. Every one of those faults is cheap in April and expensive at midnight in July.
If this is where you have got to, the page you want next is the 24-hour line.