Los Alcázares: the oldest spa hotel in Murcia and a hundred and fifty murals

Most coastal towns on the Costa Cálida have one story: there was a fishing village, and then tourism arrived. Los Alcázares has two. Tourism on the Mar Menor did not begin here with a beach hotel, but with a bathing cure of exactly nine baths. And a century later the same village reinvented itself by handing the blank walls of its housing blocks to painters.

For anyone looking for a home here, that is more than a curiosity. A place that has reinvented itself twice tells you something about how it handles its future. This article walks past the bathhouse, the murals, the tables where you eat and the rebuilt seafront — and ends with the subject a buying agent raises and a selling party would rather skip: the water.

Al Kazar: the palace, the airfield, the seven beaches

The name comes from the Arabic Al-Kazar, palace. The Arabs already used this spot as a summer residence, and in a sense it never stopped being one. In the late nineteenth century the area became popular with Spaniards who came to bathe, and wooden bathhouses rose along the shore with long jetties running out into the water.

Most of those wooden balnearios are gone. The original La Encarnación bathhouse on Playa Manzanares no longer exists; the hotel that carries the name today is a different building, in the centre of the village. What remained is the habit: you come here to lie in the water.

The municipality now counts more than seventeen thousand permanent residents. In summer that figure rises sharply, when families from Cartagena and Murcia move into their second homes. Outside that season it is an ordinary Spanish town: narrow streets, shutters closed against the midday heat, palms on the corner.

What Los Alcázares mostly is: seven beaches along seven kilometres of coast, all on the inland sea. The Mar Menor is shallow, warm and almost waveless, which has made the town popular with families and long-stay visitors for a century. And there is a detail almost nobody knows: a seaplane base was built here in 1915, the forerunner of the air force academy in neighbouring San Javier. The aviation museum in the village recalls it, and the Patrulla Águila that practises over the Mar Menor in summer descends directly from it.

1904: where tourism on the Mar Menor began

In 1904 Alfonso Carrión Belmonte opened a bathhouse on the shore: Balneario La Encarnación. It became the first hotel business on the Mar Menor and is now the oldest working hotel in the whole Region of Murcia.

The idea was medical, not recreational. Guests came for a novenario: a cure of exactly nine baths in warm seawater, on prescription, against rheumatism and skin complaints. A lead pipe carried the water straight in from the Mar Menor, into marble tubs each carved from a single block. Those tubs are still there, with the original taps on the tiled wall.

The village grew around that cure. Anyone staying nine days needed a room, a restaurant, a terrace, something to do in the evening. A medical facility turned into a holiday destination — and so, with a handful of bathers in marble tubs, tourism along this entire coast began.

Nine baths, nine days. Tourism on the Mar Menor started as a prescription.

The building is still alive

What makes the balneario remarkable is that it never became a museum. It is still a working hotel — twenty-two renovated rooms — with a restaurant and a terrace by the sea. Above the door to the old bathing wing the painted glass still reads Baños Termales.

The heart of the building is the courtyard: an inner patio overgrown from floor to roof, with wicker chairs, terracotta pots and a balcony disappearing under the climbers. Alfonso XIII and the Infante de Orleans stayed here. Antonio Machín and Marifé de Triana performed here. And here you simply sit and eat, among today’s guests.

2013: the village repaints itself

More than a century after the first bather, Los Alcázares got a second life, and again from an unexpected direction. In 2013 the artist collective La Compañía de Mario began El Pueblo Pintado — the painted village — together with the town council. Blank side walls, concrete retaining walls and empty gable ends went to artists.

There are now more than a hundred and fifty murals by around a hundred makers. In May 2026 fifty were added at once during the Festival de Arte Urbano, part of the 2025–2027 tourism strategy and funded from Next Generation EU.

What makes the project work is where it sits. This is not a fenced-off arts quarter: the walls stand between ordinary flats, beside small car parks and along residential streets where the washing hangs out. You cycle past a doorway and find yourself facing a seahorse four storeys high — the symbol of the Mar Menor, precisely where that creature has become ever rarer in the actual water.

Where you eat, and what that says about the town

The restaurants of Los Alcázares tell the same story as the rest of the village: there is an old layer and a new one, and they sit side by side rather than displacing each other.

Rice over a wood fire

Restaurante El Patio sits on the inland side of the village and does what this region is known for: arroces a la leña, rice dishes cooked over a wood fire. At the back an open grill keeps its embers glowing all day; a row of hams hangs above the carving board. No concept, just a kitchen that has done it this way for decades.

An afternoon by the water

Out on the jetty sits Armonía Beach Club — the new layer. Yellow-and-white striped signs, a wooden deck over the water and a menu halfway between beach club and restaurant. We spent an afternoon there with a board of Spanish cheeses and a plate of ibérico ham, the Mar Menor running underneath the boards.

That difference is exactly why this village works all year. The beach club runs on the season; El Patio and the balneario run on the people who live here. For anyone considering wintering, the second category matters most — those are the places still open in January.

What is happening on the seafront now

The promenade has been overhauled over the past two years, largely with European money. For a buyer that matters more than it sounds: it shows where the council is steering its budget.

As with almost any public work: timelines can shift during execution.

What this means if you want to buy here

Now the part a selling party rarely raises unprompted. Los Alcázares has a water problem, and hiding that would do you a disservice.

The centre of the village sits where the Rambla de la Maraña and a series of smaller dry watercourses converge, without one defined main channel. In a cloudburst the water therefore does not arrive in a single stream but broadly and dispersed, at street level. In 2016 the town flooded, with fatalities in the region. In 2019 it happened again — the September DANA arrived just as the repairs from 2016 had been completed, and it did not stop at once that autumn.

Much has been planned and long debated since. The concrete step is now on the table: in April 2026 the Council of Ministers approved the rambla de la Pescadería project, with a combined tender budget of more than 35.7 million euros. Phase I builds an open urban channel of roughly 1,250 metres along Avenida Fernando Muñoz Zambudio. Phase II adds a flood park that absorbs water in heavy rain and is ordinary public green space the rest of the year. When the diggers actually arrive is not yet certain; the tender is running and the pace of works like these is vigorously debated in Murcia.

None of this is a reason to write off Los Alcázares. It is a town that lives all year, with amenities that do not close in October, a flat promenade, warm calm water, and a council visibly investing in the seafront. It is a reason to look address by address rather than town by town — and to ask that question before the offer, not after.

We make no predictions about price movements. What we do see: buyers who pull up the map beforehand buy here with peace of mind. Buyers who skip it sometimes find out with the first autumn downpour.

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