Los Alcázares: a spa coast and a seaplane base

Los Alcázares runs along the south western shore of the Mar Menor, a low seafront town of promenades, bathing jetties and shallow warm water. It is the youngest municipality in the Región de Murcia, created only in 1983 out of land that had belonged to San Javier and Torre-Pacheco. Its identity is older than that date, though, and rests on two things: a long tradition of taking the waters, and the first military seaplane base in Spain.

Taking the waters

The name, from the Arabic for the palaces or lodges, points to a place people came to rather than lived in. A late Roman villa with baths has been found here, connected to the belief that the lagoon's warm salt water and its muds were good for the joints and the skin. That reputation carried through the centuries. By the late nineteenth century Murcian families were building timber bathing houses out over the water and staying in seafront hotels, and the Hotel Balneario de la Encarnación, opened in the early twentieth century, survives as the clearest reminder of that era. The wide gently shelving beaches still make the town a place associated with quiet family bathing and with spa treatments.

The seaplane base

In 1915 the Spanish army established its first seaplane station on the Mar Menor at Los Alcázares, using the sheltered lagoon as a natural runway. For the first half of the twentieth century the base was one of the pillars of Spanish military aviation, training crews and testing aircraft, and an air base remained in use here long after the seaplanes had gone. The airfield and its hangars are still a visible part of the town, one of them now an aeronautics museum, and Los Alcázares presents the site as the origin of its modern growth.

The town has older bones too. The Torre del Rame, a fortified manor house on the edge of the built-up area with medieval and later phases, is the main surviving monument from the centuries when this shore was farmland and salt marsh rather than a resort. Around it the modern town grew outward from the seafront in the second half of the twentieth century, first as summer housing for Murcian and Madrid families and then as a year-round residential town with a large retired and foreign population.

A town on a flood-prone plain

Los Alcázares has expanded quickly as a resort and residential town, and that growth has run into a hard physical limit. The town sits at the mouth of the Rambla del Albujón and other channels that drain the whole Campo de Cartagena, and intense autumn storms in recent years have flooded its streets and carried farmland sediment and nutrients straight into the lagoon. Flood defence works and the state of the Mar Menor are now central local issues rather than background detail.

Visiting

The seafront promenade, the surviving bathing jetties and the old balneario are the heart of the town, busiest in summer. Los Alcázares also keeps a fishing and lagoon-produce tradition alive through its cooking and a long-running gastronomy fair. The air academy on the neighbouring shore is covered in the guide to San Javier, the farmland behind the town in the guide to Torre-Pacheco, and the lagoon as a whole in the guide to La Manga and the Mar Menor.

Sources and review

Reviewed in September 2026 using Región de Murcia and Ayuntamiento de Los Alcázares history pages for the 1983 creation of the municipality, the Roman baths and the origin of the name, the nineteenth-century balnearios and the Hotel Balneario de la Encarnación, the Torre del Rame and the aeronautics museum, and Región de Murcia and Ejército del Aire material for the 1915 seaplane base and its place in early Spanish military aviation. The account of flooding from the Rambla del Albujón and its effect on the Mar Menor follows published reporting and official Región de Murcia environmental information, together with Ley 19/2022 in the Boletín Oficial del Estado. Fair and festival dates and access to the airfield site change, so check current municipal sources.