diff --git a/scrapy/spiders/sitemap.py b/scrapy/spiders/sitemap.py
index e54001d88..0ee8ba5e7 100644
--- a/scrapy/spiders/sitemap.py
+++ b/scrapy/spiders/sitemap.py
@@ -48,7 +48,7 @@ class SitemapSpider(Spider):
                     if any(x.search(loc) for x in self._follow):
                         yield Request(loc, callback=self._parse_sitemap)
             elif s.type == 'urlset':
-                for loc in iterloc(s):
+                for loc in iterloc(s, self.sitemap_alternate_links):
                     for r, c in self._cbs:
                         if r.search(loc):
                             yield Request(loc, callback=c)
diff --git a/tests/test_spider.py b/tests/test_spider.py
index 94771b8be..929e0fea8 100644
--- a/tests/test_spider.py
+++ b/tests/test_spider.py
@@ -348,6 +348,33 @@ Sitemap: /sitemap-relative-url.xml
                           'http://example.com/sitemap-uppercase.xml',
                           'http://www.example.com/sitemap-relative-url.xml'])
 
+    def test_alternate_url_locs(self):
+        sitemap = b"""<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
+    <urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
+        xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
+        <url>
+            <loc>http://www.example.com/english/</loc>
+            <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="de"
+                href="http://www.example.com/deutsch/"/>
+            <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="de-ch"
+                href="http://www.example.com/schweiz-deutsch/"/>
+            <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="it"
+                href="http://www.example.com/italiano/"/>
+            <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="it"/><!-- wrong tag without href -->
+        </url>
+    </urlset>"""
+        r = TextResponse(url="http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml", body=sitemap)
+        spider = self.spider_class("example.com")
+        self.assertEqual([req.url for req in spider._parse_sitemap(r)],
+                         ['http://www.example.com/english/'])
+
+        spider.sitemap_alternate_links = True
+        self.assertEqual([req.url for req in spider._parse_sitemap(r)],
+                         ['http://www.example.com/english/',
+                          'http://www.example.com/deutsch/',
+                          'http://www.example.com/schweiz-deutsch/',
+                          'http://www.example.com/italiano/'])
+
 
 class DeprecationTest(unittest.TestCase):