A set of historical tide gauge sea level records from Alicante (Spanish Mediterranean coast) have been recovered from logbooks stored at the Spanish National Geographical Institute (IGN). Sea level measurements have been digitised, quality-controlled and merged into two consistent sea level time series. Vertical references among instruments benchmarks have been derived from high precision vertical levelling surveys. Earlier observations are daily averages and more recent data are hourly values. The observations are from 7 different tide gauge records in Alicante outer harbour (Alicante I) and five tide gauge series in Alicante inner harbour (Alicante II). The sea level record in Alicante starts in 1870 with daily averaged values until the 1920s and hourly afterwards, and is still in operation, thus representing the longest tide gauge sea level time series in the Mediterranean Sea. The sea level at Alicante I has been measured by tide pole, floating gauge, mechanical recorder, digital recorder and since 2014 by radar gauge. The sea level at Alicante II has been measured by floating gauge, digital recorder and from 2014 onwards by radar gauge. This scarcity of long-term sea-level observations, as well as their uneven geographical distribution is a major challenge for climate studies that address, for example, the quantification of mean sea-level rise at centennial time scales, the accurate assessment of sea-level acceleration or the long-term changes in sea-level extremes that are vital for coastal risk assessments. This dataset represents an additional effort of sea-level data archaeology and aims at preserving the historical scientific heritage that has been up to now stored in old archives in non-electronic format. The research was partially funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities. A further series was rescued from Santander under the same initiative.