Mutxamel: the huerta and the water from Tibi

Muchamiel lies just inland from Alicante on the river Monnegre, at the centre of what is left of the Huerta de Alicante. For four centuries this small plain of orchards and irrigation channels was fed by a single remarkable structure upstream, the dam at Tibi, and Muchamiel's history is bound up with building it, paying for it and sharing its water.

The Huerta de Alicante

The huerta was a belt of irrigated land north of Alicante that once reached across the modern municipalities of Alicante, San Juan, El Campello and Muchamiel. Its soil is fertile but the rainfall is among the lowest on the Spanish mainland, so everything depended on storing the flash flows of the Monnegre, the river that becomes the Río Seco as it nears the coast. Wine, almonds, cereals and vegetables came off this land for the Alicante market and the export trade through its port. Today the cultivated huerta survives mainly within Muchamiel's boundaries, threaded by acequias and dotted with the country houses of Alicante families.

The dam at Tibi

In 1579 representatives of Alicante and its huerta villages, Muchamiel among them, agreed to build a dam in the narrows at Tibi, upstream in the hills. The idea is credited to a miller from Muchamiel, Pere Izquierdo, working with a local stonemason. Construction ran under the court engineer Joan Baptista Antonelli by order of Philip II, and the gates were closed in 1594. The curved masonry wall, more than forty metres high, created the first large reservoir of its kind in Europe and still stands and still holds water, which makes it one of the oldest dams anywhere in continuous use. The huerta's irrigators' body, the Sindicat de Reg, has administered the supply from Tibi for centuries and keeps the records.

The town and its houses

The water was never simply released. It was measured and sold in timed shares by the irrigators' association, whose officials, ledgers and dispute procedures ran the huerta for centuries and still exist. That system explains the density of channels, gates and small bridges in the fields around the town. From the mid twentieth century the Canal del Taibilla brought piped mains water to the region and the Tibi reservoir became a secondary and often unreliable supply, which is one reason so much of the old huerta outside Muchamiel has been built over.

Muchamiel's centre is built around the fortified church of El Salvador, a listed sixteenth-century building later enlarged, and a compact old quarter of narrow streets. Scattered through the surrounding fields are the grand country residences of the Alicante bourgeoisie, houses such as Peñacerrada, now a hotel, and the Finca El Torregroses, with towers, chapels and formal gardens. Several are protected and one or two are used for municipal events, though most remain private. Newer neighbourhoods and a golf resort on the Bonalba side have made Muchamiel a residential town as well as a farming one.

Visiting

The old centre and the church can be seen quickly, and the walk or drive up to the Tibi dam through the Monnegre gorge is the reason most people come. The dam is reached from the village of Tibi and the reservoir is low or empty in dry years. The neighbouring huerta towns are covered in the guides to San Juan de Alicante and El Campello, and the city that built the dam in the reviewed guide to Alicante.

Sources and review

Reviewed in September 2026 using the Sindicato de Riegos de la Huerta de Alicante's history of the Tibi dam for the 1579 agreement, the roles of Pere Izquierdo and the court engineer Antonelli, the 1594 closing of the gates and the continuing administration of the supply, Generalitat Valenciana heritage listings for the dam and for Muchamiel's protected country houses, and municipal and regional material for the extent of the Huerta de Alicante and for the church of El Salvador. Reservoir levels vary with the weather and access to the private estates is limited, so check locally before visiting.