What to see in Orihuela

Orihuela lies on the plain of the Segura river, in the southwestern corner of Alicante province, where irrigated farmland meets the sierra that shares its name. Built in golden-hued stone and wedged between the Monte de San Miguel and the riverbed, the old town holds centuries of religious and civil architecture that earned it protected historic-ensemble status in 1969, one of the first such designations in Spain. Unlike other towns in the province, Orihuela's character is tied to the valley and its market gardens rather than to the Mediterranean.

Layers of history

The city sits on a crossroads once guarded by Visigothic and later Andalusi rulers from the Castillo-Alcazaba, perched 240 metres up on the Monte de San Miguel. After the 13th-century Christian conquest, the old main mosque became the Catedral del Salvador y Santa María, its three Gothic naves and carved doorways spanning the 13th and 14th centuries. A Dominican college founded a century later grew into a pontifical university by 1569, known today as the Convento-Colegio Santo Domingo, its cloisters mixing Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque work. Nearby, the Iglesia de Santas Justa y Rufina keeps a gargoyled Gothic bell tower with one of the oldest clocks in the country, above an interior that blends Catalan Gothic with later Renaissance and Baroque additions; the feast day of its two patron saints coincides, by local tradition, with the date of the town's Christian reconquest on 17 July 1243.

The huerta and the poet

North of the centre, the Palmeral de San Antón — the second-largest palm grove in Europe after the one in Elche — still runs on irrigation channels dug by the town's Muslim settlers, a system that continues to shape the surrounding market-garden landscape; some of its palms are more than 300 years old, and the grove forms part of the EU's Natura 2000 network of protected sites. That same landscape of orchard plots and palms shaped the childhood of poet Miguel Hernández, whose family home, now the Casa-Museo de Miguel Hernández since it opened to the public in 1985, preserves his bedroom and the fig tree in the courtyard that appears in his early poems, written before he left for Madrid in the 1930s. The huerta reaches all the way to the coast: the municipality holds 18 kilometres of shoreline next to Torrevieja, pairing a monumental interior with a Mediterranean fringe within a single town boundary, a combination few other places in the province can match.