Discovering Cartagena

More Articles By Phillip Bruce www.raxomnium.com

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A Modern Playground 

Cartagena has some beautiful modernist, modernism, or modern buildings – or whatever you want to call them. 

The prosperity of the early 20^th century, built on mining, minerals and manufacturing, created wealth for the business classes and they lavished money on architectural extravagances. 

Some, however, were looking forward into the very latest modern styles and commissioned buildings that carried developed the very latest thinking of European architects and designers. 

The San Florentina School, on the Paseo Alfonso XIII, is a 1930s delight, newly painted and all clean and elegant lines – it’s the white building in the pictures. Look at the friezes around the doors. 

At the other end of the Paseo Alfonso XIII is the un-missable building that houses the regional parliament of Murcia.  There is an obvious Barcelona interest here and the wild tiling and flowing lines provide a great deal of interest.  This is a relatively recent building.  Sometimes you can talk your way inside for a look at the interior covered courtyard. 

There is a great modernist house in Calle Aire, near to the intersection with Calle Cañon.  Look up at the gray façade and you will see wonderful lightning flashes and other decorative elements. 

Cartagena citizens should thank the Gods daily for the fact that a site behind the old town hall did not become available to developers in the 1960s or1970s.  Otherwise horrors such as the buildings that face the main entrance to the town hall, on either side of a building that has survived from more elegant times, would have appeared.  Developers in the “sod ‘em” tradition are now happily working all over the region on urbanizations aimed at foreign buyers.  Have a look at the wall that surrounds Mosa Trajectum and the tacky entrance archway and weep. Nobody told the designers of this place that Cartagena windmills were a key feature of the landscape in the past and many have been restored. Instead, they have plunked some strange pastiche windmill from a cartoon book on their golf course to annoy locals passing by. 

Thankfully, the site at the back of the town hall now houses a fine modern building, the NH Hotel that is in sympathy and in scale with its surroundings.   

At the seaward end of the Calle Gisbert there is an excellent swirling staircase that allows people to walk up onto the city walls.

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