Alhama de Murcia,
the water beneath the sierra

Alhama de Murcia lies in the Bajo Guadalentín district, in the heart of the Region of Murcia, at around 176 metres above sea level and halfway between the capital, Murcia, and Lorca. Its municipal area is large and uneven: it starts in the valley of the river Guadalentín, crossed by the market garden, and climbs to more than 1,400 metres at the peaks of the Sierra Espuña. The municipality today has more than 24,000 inhabitants.

Its name, like that of Alhama de Almería, comes from the Arabic al-hamma: the spring of hot water. And here too, the whole history of the place begins beside that thermal spring, at the foot of the hill where the castle was built.

The settlement of the area is very old — there are traces of human activity going back thousands of years — but the present-day centre was born with the Romans. In the 1st century they made use of the hot spring to build a thermal complex at the foot of the castle hill, with spaces for recreational bathing and others for medicinal use. Those baths continued in operation in the Islamic period, when the place took the name al-hamma.

From those Andalusi centuries the castle remains, raised between the 11th and 12th centuries on the crag that dominates the town. In 1165 its surroundings were the scene of the battle of Fahs al-Yallab. After the Christian conquest, the town came under the lordship of the Fajardo family, future marquises of Vélez, who controlled it from the end of the 14th century.

The German traveller Jerónimo Münzer already praised the baths of Alhama in 1494. On the old thermal structures, a hotel-spa was built in the 19th century, which enjoyed its heyday until the 1930s. The arrival of the railway in 1885 helped consolidate the growth of the town.

The most distinctive event is Los Mayos, declared a Festival of National Tourist Interest in 2018. On the first weekend of May, the streets fill with life-size rag figures that, with humour and satire, portray scenes from current affairs and from village life.

Holy Week, of Regional Tourist Interest since 1995, brings together a dozen processions with more than fifty floats. The calendar is rounded off with the October patron festivities — San Francisco and the Virgen del Rosario — and, in December, those of San Lázaro.

The table of Alhama is that of the Region of Murcia: vegetables and produce from the Guadalentín market garden, country rice dishes and slow-cooked stews. On that basis, the traditional Murcian dishes endure, simple and made with good produce, found in the village's bars and restaurants.

To eat, the town centre is full of tapas bars and restaurants serving Murcian cooking, while some establishments are scattered around the sierra and the outlying districts. The cooking revolves around the market garden and seasonal produce: a good starting point is a country or vegetable arroz (rice), the michirones — dried broad beans stewed with bone and paprika — as a hot starter, or the marineras, that ring-shaped breadstick topped with Russian salad and an anchovy that here you order almost by instinct.

From the market garden also come the zarangollo (courgette, onion and egg) and Murcian pisto; and, to finish, the paparajotes: lemon-tree leaves coated in batter and fried, dusted with sugar and cinnamon, of which you eat the batter and leave the leaf. To find out where to eat and check the up-to-date list of bars and restaurants, the most reliable source is the Tourist Office of Alhama, in the Plaza de la Constitución, which assists in Spanish, English and French.