Murcia · Campo de Cartagena
A flat dry plain in the centre of the Campo de Cartagena turned by transfer water into one of Europe's most intensive vegetable-growing districts, and now into a national argument about the Mar Menor.
Dry plain, transfer water
Torre-Pacheco takes its name from a fifteenth-century tower and farmhouse and became independent of Murcia in 1836. Much of its population still lives in scattered pedanías out among the fields.
The Tajo-Segura transfer reached the Campo de Cartagena at the end of the 1970s and moved tens of thousands of hectares from dry farming to year-round irrigation. The nitrate-rich water that drains back to the Mar Menor is now the district's central controversy.
Fast facts
INE padrón, 1 Jan 2025
34,469 in 2015
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How the Pacheco tower, dry farming and the wells, the Tajo-Segura transfer and the Mar Menor's decline explain the landscape of the central Campo de Cartagena.
Published 1 September 2026
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