Santuario de Santa María Magdalena

On a hill on the edge of Novelda, the Santuario de Santa María Magdalena is shaped, from the outside, like a jar, a reference to the vessel of balm tradition associates with the saint. The building was designed around ideas from Novelda-born engineer José Sala Sala, with a clear debt to the modernist style of Antoni Gaudí, and construction, which began in 1918, continued through several phases — one of them halted — before being substantially finished around 1946. Master builders Ceferí Escolano and Antoni Amorós directed much of the work on site.

The marble organ

Since the 1990s, the interior has held another singular project: an organ built almost entirely from marble, using red Alicante and cream-coloured marble, the work of organ builder and sculptor Iván Larrea. The instrument weighs around 40 tonnes and stands over 11 metres tall; construction has stretched across decades, and the unfinished organ was donated to Novelda town council in 2018 so the project could continue under municipal management.

Visiting

Entry to the sanctuary is ticketed, and the hilltop can be reached by road, which spares visitors the walk required for the nearby castle. Inside, a central nave flanked by two lateral spaces leads to an apse holding the image of the saint; a 17th-century bronze bell from the original hermitage that stood on the site before the current building is now kept at the city's Museo Histórico-Artístico. The sanctuary shares its hill with the Castillo de La Mola and sits inside the Clots de la Sal natural park, making it easy to combine the visit with a walk through the surrounding area.