The quiet achiever
A year ago we invited a young travel influencer to join us in Murcia, and she brought her Spanish boyfriend. She started out in Granada, they now live in Barcelona, and he was born in the north of Valencia. Neither had ever thought of Murcia as somewhere to travel. They left as converts to its beauty, variety and utility.
That isn't unusual. The Costa Cálida has drawn international buyers for decades, and had the global financial crisis not stalled so many of its resorts, it would have become a thriving sports community years earlier. It has the Costa del Sol's sunshine without the Costa del Sol's prices, and the world's most demanding athletes already know it. La Manga Club, near Cartagena, is Spain's best-known elite training camp: Spain, England, Real Madrid, Liverpool and Bayern Munich have all trained on its pitches, and its cricket centre is the overseas base for Ireland and Scotland. Every winter, the world's best cycling teams base themselves along this stretch of the Mediterranean, and ride Murcia's quiet roads and serious inland climbs.
Then there's tennis. Carlos Alcaraz learned the game at the Club de Campo in El Palmar, on the edge of the city, where his father ran the academy. Forty minutes away, La Manga's 42 tennis and padel courts make it one of Europe's best-known racquet centres, with academies for adults and children, and padel, Spain's great social sport, is never far away.
Murcia doesn't shout about its food either. This is the garden of Europe, and its best cooking is simply that produce, treated with respect. The Michelin Guide has noticed: six stars across five restaurants, including two at Cabaña Buenavista, in the same village where Alcaraz first picked up a racquet.
Every winter, riders in team kit come to the road out of Alhama, heads down, counting hairpins. For one of them, this mountain was home.
Alejandro Valverde grew up in Las Lumbreras, on the edge of Murcia city, and rode his first races in Jumilla and Yecla. He went on to win the Vuelta a España, Liège-Bastogne-Liège four times, the Flèche Wallonne five times and, in 2018, the world championship in Innsbruck. Spain called him El Bala, the bullet.
His team called the Sierra Espuña his. Its great climb is Collado Bermejo: 17.4 kilometres from Alhama, through pine forest to a summit at 1,200 metres, climbing more than a thousand metres on the way. There are more than twenty hairpins, and everyone counts them. Racing the Vuelta a Murcia in front of his home crowd, Valverde attacked over the top.
Retired from road racing, he is now the face of the region's cycling campaign, and the professional teams still come every winter for the same reasons: quiet roads, climbs that stay open all year, and January days that can reach twenty degrees.
Three thousand years by the sea
Cartagena has three thousand years of history, and it has been rebuilt so many times that it is best read in layers. Hasdrubal gave it the name Qart Hadasht, New Carthage, in 227 BC. Rome renamed it Carthago Nova and gave it a theatre for about seven thousand people.
The theatre lay hidden under the old town until it was rediscovered in 1988. Today you reach it through Rafael Moneo's museum, opened in 2008, climbing until the stone seating opens in front of you.
The deep, sheltered harbour that drew Carthaginians and Romans now draws superyachts, which tie up a few steps from the town hall.
Spend a Saturday: the theatre, the modernist facades of Calle Mayor, grilled fish by the port, and a café asiático, the city's layered coffee, to finish.
Where Alcaraz learned the game
Carlos Alcaraz was born in El Palmar, on the edge of Murcia city, and picked up a racquet at four at the Real Sociedad Club de Campo de Murcia, where his father coached. At nineteen he became the youngest men's world number one since the rankings began.
Forty minutes away, La Manga Club is one of Europe's best-known racquet centres, with academies for adults and children.
Then there is padel, often called the fastest-growing sport in the world. It was invented in Mexico in 1969, arrived in Spain at the Marbella Club a few years later, and Spain has played it more than anyone ever since.
It is always doubles, on a court ten metres by twenty, enclosed by glass walls you play the ball off. You can learn it in an afternoon and never quite master it, and with four players close enough to talk, it is as social as sport gets.
It also needs proper courts. Those glass walls cannot be improvised on a tennis court, so padel lives where it has been built for. In Murcia, that means almost every resort, club and town, and a standing Thursday four is the quickest way there is to meet the neighbours.
Fairways under the sierra
Murcia's golf does not look like the rest of Spain's. The light is drier, the hills are bare and ochre, and the fairways run out towards mountains rather than the sea.
The region has around twenty courses, anchored by the three at La Manga Club: the North, the South and the West.
At Altaona, on the foothills of the Sierra de Carrascoy, Stirling & Martin laid out a par-72 course that opened fully in 2019, grassed with paspalum that stays green and firm through the dry months. Its island green sits beneath the Carrascoy y El Valle Regional Park.
Around half an hour away, the Alhama Signature course is a Jack Nicklaus design, long and open, with the Sierra Espuña as its backdrop. The rhythm of a golf month is simple: an early round, a long lunch, and a second nine in the gold hour.
And this is the beauty of golf in Spain: private-club quality on courses anyone can book. No membership committee, no waiting list, just a tee time.
North, South, West
Stirling & Martin, 2019
Jack Nicklaus design
Taking the waters
Famous across Spain and almost unknown beyond it, the Balneario de Archena is less a spa than a small town built around hot water.
Twenty-five kilometres up the Segura from Murcia city, the water rises from the ground at 52 degrees, rich in sulphur, sodium and calcium. The Romans built baths here, and people have been coming for it ever since.
Today it is one of Spain's great thermal resorts: three hotels, restaurants, a thermal gallery, outdoor pools and a river of warm rapids that is far more fun than it has any right to be. There is even a casino, built in 1898 and now a café for cards, dominoes and conversation rather than roulette.
What makes it Spanish is the company. Spain treats thermal water as part of a good life rather than a treat, and a national programme of social spa stays has brought older Spaniards to balnearios like this for decades. They come for the waters and stay for each other: the same faces at breakfast, the same table at lunch, and almost everyone, at almost any hour, in a white bathrobe.
A new adults-only pool is on its way. Go in winter, when the outdoor pools steam against the cold air.
The valley and the vine
North of the Ricote valley, Murcia rises onto the Altiplano, a high plateau where vineyards climb to 800 metres above the sea. The days are hot, the nights are cold, and it barely rains.
That dry, sandy ground spared many vines from phylloxera, the pest that wiped out most of Europe's vineyards in the nineteenth century. Old Monastrell vines, some still on their own roots, give tiny, intensely concentrated berries.
Across Jumilla, Yecla and Bullas, producers like Casa Castillo, Juan Gil and Luzón make wines that critics rank among Spain's best, and Casa Castillo's Pie Franco, with a perfect hundred, may well be the least expensive hundred-point wine in the world.
So why haven't you heard of them? Murcia has a recognition problem, not a quality problem. La Rioja and Ribera del Duero built one name the world could remember. Murcia's wine towns each went their own way, three small appellations instead of one great region. The upside is in your glass: world-class wine at prices that don't need a special occasion.
The long table
Murcia is called the orchard of Europe, and it eats like it. Lunch starts at two and runs as long as the conversation does.
On the Mar Menor, order caldero: rice cooked in a rich fish stock with garlic and the region's dried ñora peppers. Inland, it is zarangollo, michirones and pastel de carne, and paparajotes for pudding, lemon leaves fried in batter that you eat around.
In Murcia city, the evening starts standing up. Order a marinera, Russian salad piled on a ring of breadstick and crowned with an anchovy, and a glass of local Monastrell, then move on to the next bar around the cathedral. Nobody sits down to dinner much before ten.
For a special night, book Taúlla in Murcia city: a tasting menu in a restored 1925 paprika mill, listed in the Michelin Guide and holding a Repsol Sun.
Then let a month teach you the rest. The best tables here never make a guide.
Where a visit
becomes
a season
In Murcia, visitors stay for weeks, return in spring and autumn, and arrive in growing numbers. Spain's own statistics show how.
The first week is a holiday. By the third there is a favourite bakery, a regular table on the plaza, and a cycling route that no longer needs the map.
That rhythm shows up in Spain's official figures. Across 2023 to 2025, 16.1% of international tourists in the Region of Murcia stayed more than 15 nights. Across Spain as a whole the figure is about 6%. Visitors to Murcia are two and a half times as likely to settle in.
The cooler months push it higher. Between October and March, one visitor in five stays more than a fortnight. In 2025 about 96,000 international visitors stayed in the region for a month or longer, 7.9% of the total and the highest share in Spain's south-east, ahead of the Valencia region and Andalucía.
They also stay longer on every visit. Murcia records the longest average stay of any Spanish region, around twelve nights against a national average of just over seven.
The calendar is wide. The British, the region's largest market at about 326,000 visitors a year, arrive in two waves, April and October, each busier than August. German and Dutch visitors come in almost equal numbers every month, and they are among those who stay longest: 23% of Germans, 22% of Nordic visitors and 21% of the French stay more than a fortnight.
Winter days that can reach twenty degrees, golf and cycling seasons that run through the colder months, and spa towns in the river valleys all play their part. So does momentum: the region welcomed 1.04 million international tourists in 2019 and 1.22 million in 2025, and July 2026 was its busiest July on record.
Murcia's visitors settle in
Sources: Spain's National Statistics Institute. Length of stay from the Frontur border survey (Region of Murcia, 2023 to 2025) and from the Egatur visitor-spending survey records (all twelve months of 2025). Monthly visitors from the institute's mobile network tourism statistics and the Frontur survey, via Dataestur. Average stay from regional figures reported for 2026. Regional monthly figures by nationality come from smaller samples and are best read as patterns.
15 years.
One month
a year.
Issue 001
Winter 2026