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Abd ar-Rahman II, Emir of Cordoba, founded Murcia in 825 AD under the Arabic name Mursiyah on the Segura River in southeastern Spain. The city grew through the medieval period as a prosperous independent kingdom with a Jewish quarter on streets that still carry their old names: the Plateria, where silversmiths worked, and the Traperia, where cloth merchants traded. After the Christian reconquest in 1243, Murcia spent decades shuttling between Castile and Aragon before permanently joining Castile in 1304. The Moorish street pattern underneath the later construction is still legible if you know where to look.

The Cathedral of Murcia was begun in 1394 and given its current extraordinary Baroque tower and facade in the 18th century, completed in 1792.

The interior is Gothic; the exterior is one of the most theatrical in Spain. Francisco Salzillo, the sculptor who lived here from 1707 to 1783, made the life-sized polychrome figures that are carried through the city streets on Holy Week each spring. Seeing them by candlelight at night turns the procession into something between a public ritual and a collective dream. The Casino on Traperia Street, built in 1847, has a Moorish courtyard that was directly inspired by Granada's Alhambra, a room so lavish that it seems out of place and perfectly at home simultaneously.