La Unión: a mining town and its flamenco festival
La Unión lies in the hills between Cartagena and the Mar Menor, on the edge of the Sierra Minera, a low range that has been dug for lead, silver, zinc and iron since antiquity. The town is young, industrial and unusual: it was created in the nineteenth century by a mining boom, nearly emptied when the boom ended, and is now best known across Spain for a flamenco festival that grew directly out of the songs of the mines.
A town made by mining
The Romans worked these hills hard, and Carthago Nova's early wealth came partly from the silver and lead mined around what is now La Unión. Modern industrial mining took off from the 1840s and drew tens of thousands of workers, many from Andalusia. In 1860 the settlements of El Garbanzal and Herrerías were formally joined into a single municipality, and after a local dispute the combined town took the name La Unión in 1868. Around the turn of the twentieth century it had close to thirty thousand residents and a centre of confident modernista buildings paid for with mineral money.
The Antiguo Mercado and the Sierra Minera
The best of that architecture is the old public market, the Antiguo Mercado Público, designed by Pedro Cerdán with the involvement of Víctor Beltrí and completed in 1907. Its iron frame, glass and coloured tile belong to the same industrial confidence that built the headframes on the hills above, and the town hall in the former Casa del Piñón carries the same modernista language. Those hills are now an open-air record of two thousand years of extraction, with shafts, chimneys, washing plants and spoil heaps kept as heritage in a mining park. The environmental legacy is also visible. Waste from the mines was discharged straight into the sea and filled much of the bay at Portmán, on the coast within the municipality, which has been the subject of a long and contested clean-up, and the spoil that remains on the hills still colours the run-off after rain.
The Cante de las Minas
Mining decline set in after the First World War, recovered for a time under a French company in the mid twentieth century, and ended when the last mines closed in 1991 after two millennia of work. The population fell sharply and many families left for Cartagena, Barcelona and abroad. What kept La Unión's name alive was the Festival Internacional del Cante de las Minas, first held in 1961 to rescue the mining styles of flamenco song, the cartageneras, mineras, tarantas and levanticas that developed among the workers of the Sierra. It is now one of the most important flamenco competitions in the world, held each August, and since the late 1980s it has taken place inside the restored Antiguo Mercado. It was declared of National Tourist Interest in 1984 and of International Tourist Interest in 2006, and its guitar and singing prizes are among the most sought after in flamenco.
Visiting
The mining park on the hills, the Antiguo Mercado and the small mining museums in the centre are the main things to see, and the festival takes over the town for two weeks in summer. Portmán bay, down on the coast, is a striking and sobering stop. Cartagena, which shares the same mining history and the same sierra, is covered in the guide to Cartagena, and the coast to the west in the reviewed guide to Mazarrón bay by boat.
Sources and review
Reviewed in September 2026 using Región de Murcia history pages for the 1860 union of El Garbanzal and Herrerías, the 1868 adoption of the name La Unión, the mining boom and the population peak, the 1991 closure of the mines and the filling of Portmán bay, Ayuntamiento de La Unión and Región de Murcia cultural material for the Antiguo Mercado Público, its 1907 completion and its architects Pedro Cerdán and Víctor Beltrí, and the festival's own history and Región de Murcia tourism for the first Cante de las Minas in 1961, its move into the market building and its International Tourist Interest status from 2006. Festival dates and site access change each year, so confirm them with the current municipal and festival sources.