Regional information and history
This map shows 120 municipalities through Alicante and Murcia. Our information expands out from the lower Segura, where a chain of towns shares one river, one irrigation system and the rebuilding that followed the 1829 earthquake.
Boundaries © IGN via OpenDataSoft · localities © OpenStreetMap contributors
Tap a highlighted municipality to zoom in and filter the stories below. The rest of the map is coverage still to come.
From the map
Browse the places already covered, from the Segura huerta to the Costa Blanca.
Rojales grew beside the River Segura, where water engineering sustained the huerta and cave dwellings became a living craft quarter.
One of the smallest municipalities in the Vega Baja, settled in the eighteenth century to farm land irrigated from the Segura and rebuilt after the 1829 earthquake.
Destroyed by the 1829 earthquake and rebuilt on a wide orthogonal grid, Almoradí is the market and artichoke town near the centre of the Vega Baja.
The last town on the Segura before the sea, rebuilt after 1829 behind a pine forest planted to hold back the dunes, with major archaeology at the river mouth.
A cathedral city compressed between the Segura and Monte San Miguel, with a former university, Miguel Hernández's home and an irrigated huerta at its edges.
A town pressed against an isolated limestone wall, where a tenth-century castle, protected sierra and remembered hemp industry meet the irrigated plain.
A former agricultural lordship at the foot of the Sierra de Callosa, now read through its huerta water, steep paths and unusually close relationship with the rock.
A compact huerta town beneath the Sierra de Callosa, watched by a restored castle-palace and interpreted through an old flour mill turned agricultural museum.
An eighteenth-century town founded through Cardinal Belluga's drainage works, where a regular civic centre sits inside a landscape of azarbes, huerta and wetland margins.
A low huerta municipality irrigated by the Acequia Mayor, with a medieval documentary record and a nature classroom at the protected edge of El Hondo.
Albatera joins an irrigated plain to the dry Rambla Salada and the Sierra de Albatera, with a long-lived civic centre around Santiago Apóstol.
Algorfa grew through the medieval Alfonsine privilege and is still read through its parish square, hilltop hermitage and nearby Hoyo Serrano ravine.
Benejúzar moved after the destructive earthquake of 1829; its ordered centre and the wooded Sierra de Benejúzar now tell the town's story together.
Bigastro compresses the La Pedrera upland, an eighteenth-century civic centre and traditional huerta into the municipal Alquibla route.
Jacarilla's early twentieth-century Fontalba palace and two-hectare garden preserve the last great seigneurial ensemble built in the Vega Baja.
San Miguel de Salinas stands above the coastal plain, where protected cave-house groups and a municipal archive record independence from Orihuela in 1836.
Los Montesinos became independent in 1990, but its landscape retains older estate houses, irrigation traces and a close relationship with La Mata lagoon.
Formentera del Segura occupies a compact bend of the lower river where a flour mill, waterwheels and channels recall an agricultural municipality founded under Alfonsine law.
Daya Nueva is a low settlement ringed by citrus, artichoke and potato fields, with an Arabic-derived name and the absorbed hamlet of Puebla de Rocamora.
Daya Vieja is one of the smallest municipalities in the Vega Baja, encircled by acequias and huerta and rebuilt after the 1829 earthquake.
Rafal developed from an Arabic-named rural estate into an independent seventeenth-century marquisate whose compact streets remain surrounded by huerta.
Granja de Rocamora combines a compact agricultural town, the long history of the Rocamora lords and the surviving Torre Mora on its edge.
Benferri formed around the Rocamora estate and achieved Alfonsine jurisdiction after its settlement reached fifteen houses in the early seventeenth century.
San Isidro was laid out in the 1950s by José Luis Fernández del Amo to reclaim saline ground, beside the Bronze Age and emirate-period site of Cabezo Pardo.
One of the largest and most international settlements on the Alicante coast, laid out around the royal salt administration in 1803 and rebuilt on a grid after the 1829 earthquake.
A Vega Baja town drained from marshland by Cardinal Belluga in 1729, now far outgrown by the international La Marina urbanisation towards the coast.
The newest municipality in Alicante province, independent from Orihuela since 1986, on farmland the Romans crossed and Barbary raids once threatened.
A fishing and salt-working town on its broad bay, with a 2,470-hectare wetland to the west and Tabarca lying offshore beyond the cape.
A Mediterranean port city gathered below the fortress on Monte Benacantil, where the old quarters, Explanada, city beach and working harbour meet.
A dry sierra town shaped by scarce water, cave dwellings and a long passage from esparto and rush matting to Spain's modern carpet industry.
A city built into an irrigated palm landscape, where the medieval Misteri, the archaeology of Ilici and a modern footwear economy remain part of everyday Elx.
A white hillside town where the blue-tiled church domes, an enduring artistic community and the lanes down to the bay give Altea its distinctive shape.
A compact vertical city whose towers rise behind Levante and Poniente, while the old centre still occupies the headland between them.
A seafront town of coloured historic houses where a working fishing port, a long chocolate industry and the remains of Roman Allon share the same coast.
An inland town where the Algar's springs, channels and terraces support a protected wetland, a working irrigation landscape and the Marina Baixa's níspero crop.
A tiny municipality organised around a rock-cut fortress entrance, castle ruins and a detached bell tower overlooking the modern Guadalest reservoir.
l'Alfàs del Pi grew around a seventeenth-century irrigation system and today links its inland centre to the Roman villa, lighthouse and protected coast at l'Albir.
Finestrat rises beneath the Puig Campana yet reaches the sea through a narrow coastal strip, joining terraces, a hilltop old town and Cala de Finestrat.
La Nucía's historic centre is organised around the Font de la Favara and old washhouse, while a deliberate network of sports and cultural buildings defines its recent growth.
Polop wraps around an Islamic castle hill and the famous Fonts dels Xorros, where the public fountain makes the mountain water system part of the townscape.
Orxeta preserves a nineteenth-century street pattern, a medieval castle site and older rock-art shelters in the valley where the Sella feeds the Amadorio reservoir.
Relleu occupies a broad mountain basin of olive and almond terraces, watched by castle remains and drained through a narrow gorge blocked by a historic masonry dam.
A town built around the Penyal d'Ifac, where a Roman coastal site, fishing harbour and urban salt lagoon reveal far more than a beach resort.
An inland old town, a working port and the Arenal share one broad bay below the Montgó, connected by the golden tosca stone quarried from Xàbia's shore.
One municipality with two distinct centres: fortified Teulada among Moscatel country inland and Moraira around a natural harbour and defended bay on the coast.
A port city where the castle records Roman Dianium, the Taifa of Daniya and the later town, while the Montgó and a working food culture shape its present setting.
A vineyard town sheltered by limestone sierras, known for individually bagged table grapes and an unusually rich landscape of dry-stone field shelters.
A compact farming town between the Sierra de los Frailes and Sierra de Crevillent, named for two centuries under the Dominican lordship of Redován and an independent municipality since 1926.
An inland mining town and Mediterranean port connected by Phoenician ship finds, Roman fish-salting, Bolnuevo's erosions and a long dry coast.
A naval harbour where the Punic and Roman city, an eighteenth-century arsenal and a modern Mediterranean port occupy the same sheltered basin.
A developed sandbar between the Mediterranean and the Mar Menor, shared by two councils and inseparable from the lagoon's environmental crisis.
The city at the centre of the Segura's irrigated huerta, where a layered cathedral, Salzillo's sculpture and civic rooms connect the regional capital to its own landscape.
A mountain town whose protected Jijona and Turrón de Alicante industries, seasonal ice-cream trade and hilltop castle explain far more than a Christmas sweet.
A Vinalopó town where modernista houses and a hilltop sanctuary grew beside natural-stone businesses, spice packing and vineyards of bagged table grapes.
The northern tip of the Mar Menor, where a working saltworks, protected dunes and the traditional encañizadas fisheries share one stretch of low coast.
The western shore of the Mar Menor, where a purpose-built bathing resort, the northern La Manga sandbar and the Spanish air force academy share one flat lagoon coast.
The Region of Murcia's youngest municipality, a Mar Menor spa coast with Roman baths behind it, the first Spanish seaplane base beside it and a flooding problem in front of it.
A flat dry plain in the centre of the Campo de Cartagena turned by transfer water into one of Europe's most intensive vegetable-growing districts, and now into a national argument about the Mar Menor.
A town created by a nineteenth-century mining boom, half-emptied when the mines closed, and kept in the national eye by the flamenco festival that grew out of the songs of the Sierra.
A long thin fishing coast north east of Alicante, with a working port, a corsair watchtower and one of the most important archaeological sites on the Costa Blanca on a spur beside it.
The centre of what survives of the Huerta de Alicante, an irrigated plain fed for four centuries by the dam at Tibi, one of the oldest large dams still in use anywhere.
The province's smallest municipality by area, historically the huerta estate country of the Alicante bourgeoisie and now a compact residential town around a protected historic core.
The largest of Alicante's ring towns by population, a former farming village whose southern edge is the University of Alicante campus, built on the ground of the Rabasa airfield.
A small town at the foot of the Maigmó that has made pottery for seven centuries, and above all the botijo, the porous unglazed jar that keeps water cool by evaporation.
120
municipalities in the mapped area
64
places with a reviewed story
67
place articles connected to the map
