Jumilla

People have lived on and around Jumilla's castle hill since the Bronze Age. Iberians settled there first, followed by Romans, whose presence left remarkable traces: the Iberian complex at Coímbra in the Barranco Ancho, a Roman funerary building known as El Casón on the edge of town, and the famous Hypnos sculpture discovered in the late nineteenth century — now displayed at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin.

Under Moorish rule the town was known as Ğumalla. Christians took it back in the thirteenth century, and Jumilla's medieval history is one of competing crowns and shifting loyalties. Initially absorbed into the Castilian kingdom of Murcia under the Treaty of Alcaraz in 1243, it passed to the Crown of Aragon in 1304 following the Arbitral Sentence of Torrellas. By 27 April 1358 it had returned definitively to Castile, and in 1445 it was incorporated into the lordship of Villena.

In 1468 Diego Pacheco, second Marquis of Villena, appointed his half-brother Rodrigo López Pacheco as governor of Jumilla. During the Castilian war of succession (1475–1479), the Catholic Monarchs replaced him on 15 March 1475 with the Aragonese captain Andrés Mateo de Guardiola y Aragón, who had seized the fortress. The town nonetheless remained nominally the property of the Pacheco family, and it was during this period of Pacheco lordship that the castle took on its current architectural form. The Villena marquises held sway until the abolition of the seigniorial system in the early nineteenth century.

Winemaking also traces its roots to this period of noble rule. By the mid-nineteenth century, when the Madoz geographical dictionary described the town, Jumilla was entering a period of growth, with a bourgeois expansion quarter built in the latter half of that century and into the early twentieth.

Jumilla's old quarter is officially designated a historic-artistic ensemble, and the range of monuments within it is unusually rich for a town of its size.

The most prominent religious building is the Church of Santiago, a National Monument since 1931 and notable as the first church with a large dome over the crossing to be built in the diocese of Cartagena. Construction ran across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The baroque Church of El Salvador, also from the seventeenth century, holds cultural heritage status, as does the Teatro Vico, a theatre built in 1883 by Justo Millán.

Among the civic buildings, the Palacio del Concejo stands out. Built in 1558 by architect Julián de Alamíquez, it is considered one of the finest and rarest surviving examples of Renaissance civil architecture in the Murcia region. Nearby, Casa Honda at Calle del Rico 12 — also a protected cultural asset — was built in the early sixteenth century in Renaissance style. Its interior courtyard, framed by four stone columns and a Renaissance frieze, is the highlight; the ceilings carry elaborate plasterwork decorated with grotesque reliefs, candelieri, flowers, vases and fantastical figures in the Italian taste. It now houses the craft and exhibition centre of the Casa del Artesano.

Next door at number 14, the Casa Solariega Pérez de los Cobos is a late-sixteenth-century Renaissance palace whose street façade retains Castilian iron grilles, small roof canopies, and a split pediment bearing the Pérez de los Cobos coat of arms supported by rampant lions. It currently serves as the Casa de la Música.

The Casa Solariega de Lozano on Calle Esteban Tomás, also late sixteenth century, preserves fine interior plasterwork ceilings and a Gothic doorway. It was the birthplace of Juan Lozano y Lozano (1610), who went on to become Viceroy of Naples, Archbishop of Palermo, and bishop of two further sees. On Calle Castelar 32, the Casa de Doña Sandalia carries an exceptional carved coat of arms on its façade and more plasterwork inside awaiting restoration.

The Arco de San Roque, or Puerta de Granada, is the old gateway into town from the Granada road. A chapel dedicated to San Roque was built above it as protection against plague and epidemic; the current structure dates from 1642, and its floor is laid with eighteenth-century Valencian tiles in green and yellow plant motifs. Other monuments include El Casón, the Roman funerary building from the third or fourth century, also a National Monument since 1931, and the castle itself, built over the remains of an earlier Arab fortification.