El Puerto de Mazarrón
For nearly ten years I have been visiting the little town of Puerto de Mazarrón, on the coast of the autonomous Region of Murcia. I first went there in March 2017. I have become strangely attached to it.
Puerto lies on the Bahía de Mazarrón, with the Mediterranean in front of it and mountains behind. Cartagena is about thirty-five kilometres away by road, on the other side of those mountains. Murcia, the regional capital, lies further inland at the heart of what is called the Huerta de Europa. Murcia is neither Andalucía nor Catalonia nor Galicia. It is a small, single-province autonomous community with a history and character of its own.
People were living in the country around Puerto long before the Phoenicians sailed into its bay. Several caves in the municipality of Mazarrón contain evidence of Neanderthal occupation. The succession of peoples who have lived here does not therefore begin with Carthaginians, Romans or Moors, nor even entirely with Homo sapiens. Human presence in this landscape is older and stranger than the conventional history of Spain.
The region has been occupied, worked and fought over by Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans, Moors, imperial Spaniards, Republicans and Francoists. Cartagena began as the Carthaginian Qart Hadasht and became the Roman Carthago Nova. It remained loyal to the Republic throughout almost the whole of the Spanish Civil War. Francoist troops entered the city on 31st March 1939, one day before Franco declared the war over.
I sometimes think I am attracted to tricky places: Brighton, Eton, LSE, Northern Ireland and Murcia. The municipality of Mazarrón certainly belongs in that category. It has a vigorous independence of mind and being. It can be friendly, suspicious, generous, rough, beautiful and appallingly ugly, sometimes in the course of the same street.
This part of Spain has always made its living from what is to hand. First there was the sea, then the minerals in the hills, then the soil, and finally the climate itself. Fishing, mining, farming and tourism have succeeded and overlapped one another. Check the tomatoes in your UK Tesco and there is a reasonable chance that they will be Murcian.
The sea has never simply marked the edge of Puerto. It has always been a road. Ancient ships came here to trade and carry away minerals. Two Phoenician vessels were discovered close to Playa de la Isla. Under the modern town are the remains of a large Roman factory that produced salted fish and fish sauces, including garum, for export around the empire. Its remains are preserved in the archaeological museum in the centre of Puerto, although I think of it simply as the fish sauce museum.
For all this history, Puerto has remarkably little grand historical architecture. Murcia city has its exuberant Baroque buildings, theatrical church façades and carved saints. Cartagena displays layer after layer of military, Roman and civic importance. Puerto is different. Much of its history is underground, underwater or industrial. What stands above ground is usually practical: houses, port building, mine workings, shops, apartment blocks and tourist urbanisations.
One of Puerto’s charms is the modest scale of its seafront. Compared with Benidorm, which might not have looked so very different seventy years ago, Puerto has largely escaped the solid wall of towers that separates so many Spanish resorts from the sea. People say that, sometime under Franco, a farsighted mayor prohibited high-rise construction along the seafront. Whether this is true does not especially matter. It is what people in Puerto say, and local stories are part of the character of a place.
There is, however, one tower that looms over the Bahía end of town. Another story says that Franco ordered it to be built for his secret police, who used it to watch over his granddaughter when she holidayed locally. That story should also be taken with a pinch of salt. Salt is something of which Puerto has had a liberal supply. The Bahía area was developed on old salt flats, and the flatness of the land still becomes obvious when the rain arrives and the water has nowhere sensible to go.
The summers feel hotter than they did even ten years ago, and the rain heavier and more frequent. Bahía floods more.
The modern arrival of migrants from North Africa belongs within a much longer history of movement. But it should not be treated as a sentimental epilogue about shipwrecks. Puerto has always been changed by people arriving, leaving, settling, working and being absorbed imperfectly into the life of the town. Boats still cross the sea from Algeria and Morocco, and some do not complete the journey. The people who do arrive become part of the changing population of a working town and region. They work in agriculture, construction, hospitality and other parts of the local economy. Contemporary immigration has created accommodation, suspicion and tension, but change itself is hardly foreign to this coast.
There are few sights more absurd than an English expat sitting in a Murcian bar complaining that immigration has changed the character of the place since they’ve lived there. The English are always expats and never immigrants. Fortunately, many of the worst specimens confine themselves to the inland compound of Camposol. Camposol manages the remarkable feat of being physically situated in Spain while treating Spain itself as an optional extra.
Puerto is quieter and less spectacular than many Spanish coastal towns. It is also more useful to me. A coffee still costs little more than a euro. The sea is close. I know the streets, the buses, the bakeries and some of the people. I can live there cheaply, sit outside, write, read, graze on bread, tomatoes and pastries, amble around the Sunday market, and allow the days to pass without constantly having to decide where I am going next.
El Puerto de Mazarrón is not a tourist resort. It is a town in its own right, with a life and livelihood that exist beyond its foreign visitors. At its most intensely resort-like, it is a Spanish resort. In July and August it comes noisily and vividly alive as hordes of madrileños and sevillanos arrive at their holiday homes. Their pleasure, their cooking, their children and their racket are part of the charm of summer in the port. The Spanish will cheerfully begin preparing dinner at midnight and have never displayed much faith in the indoor voice.
Summer is for the Spanish, and woe betide anyone who complains about the Spanish filling a Spanish town and behaving Spanishly in it. That is why I have become fond of El Puerto de Mazarrón. It is not cool or ostentatiously glamorous. It is not the most beautiful town, and it does not have the greatest vistas. But it intends to keep on doing what it likes in order to get along. Visitors may imagine that they have discovered it, improved it or been there long enough to possess it. But this bit of the world knows better. It knows that we will not be here long.
