Village
La Unión is a municipality in the Campo de Cartagena comarca, enclosed within the municipal area of Cartagena and with a Mediterranean coastline through its pedanías of Roche and Portmán. It has around 21,380 inhabitants (INE 2025). Its history is tied to mining in the sierra de Cartagena-La Unión, already worked in Roman times, when silver, lead, iron and zinc ingots were exported to the Empire through the port of Portmán. The municipality was born on 1 January 1860 as Villa de El Garbanzal, through the secession of the local councils of El Garbanzal, Herrerías and Portmán; in 1868, with the Glorious Revolution, Juan Prim promoted their merger under the name La Unión, which received city status in 1894. It came to exceed 30,000 inhabitants before the mines closed in 1991.
Monument
A complex for the rehabilitation of industrial heritage that recovers eight former 19th-century mining sites over 50,000 square metres of the Sierra Minera, toured by means of a tourist mining train. It was inaugurated on 9 July 2010 and preserves facilities such as the tailings pond, where waste from the washing plants was accumulated, the ball mill where the ore was crushed, the roasting furnaces, where the ore was calcined with wood or coal, and the powder magazines where explosives were stored. Also notable is the chimney-coil of the Trinidad Rentero Lead Smelter, zigzagging brick galleries built into the hillside, through which the smoke cooled while the lead condensed on their walls, from where it was later recovered.
Monument
The Agrupa Vicenta mine is a mine from 1869 adapted for tourist visits in the Sierra Minera de Cartagena-La Unión, within the Parque Minero de La Unión, in the Región de Murcia. It is reached via the Ruta Minera del Camino del 33, an old path used by miners travelling between La Unión and Portmán. A gallery leads into a chamber of about 4,000 square metres and up to 80 metres deep beneath the slope of monte Sancti Spiritu, considered one of the largest visitable mines in Europe, with vaults up to eight metres high. Excavated using the room-and-pillar system in a pyrite-bearing vein about five metres thick known as manto de los azules, from which mainly pyrite was extracted, it also holds an underground lake with reddish waters.
Monument
Museum housed in the former Liceo de Obreros building, an essential stop for understanding the history of Spanish mining in the Sierra de Cartagena-La Unión.
Monument
Museum dedicated to mining songs and to the history of the Festival Internacional del Cante de las Minas, held since 1961, housed in the Casa del Piñón. This building, the work of architect Pedro Cerdán, is an example of the beaux-arts eclecticism that characterises the civil heritage of La Unión, linked to the town's mining prosperity.
Monument
The old public market of La Unión is a modernist building of iron and glass, conceived as a marketplace at a time of great economic prosperity for the town thanks to lead and silver mining. Designed in 1903 by architects Pedro Cerdán and Víctor Beltrí and completed in 1907, it is, together with the Gran Hotel de Cartagena, one of the most outstanding works of Murcian modernisme. Iron columns support the whole structure and almost all the openings were covered in glass to light the airy interior; the main façade is topped by a small domed bell turret. Declared a Monumento histórico-artístico (a former Spanish heritage-protection designation, predecessor of the Bien de Interés Cultural) in 1975, it today hosts cultural events and is the seat of the Festival Internacional del Cante de las Minas.
Monument
The Museo Arqueológico de La Unión occupies the old Hospital de Caridad de Portmán, a building constructed in 1892 to care for those injured in mining work, and is dedicated to the Roman presence in the Sierra Minera de Cartagena-La Unión, whose silver, lead, iron and zinc mines were intensively worked in the era of Carthago Nova and exported through the port of Portmán itself, the Latin Portus Magnus. Arranged in three rooms, it brings together material remains of the sierra's mining and industrial exploitation from prehistoric times onward, though the bulk of the collection dates from the Roman period; among its most important pieces are fragments of a large polychrome mosaic from the Roman villa of Paturro, discovered near Portmán.
Monument
The Museo Etnográfico de Roche occupies the old schoolhouse of the hamlet, built in 1909 and refurbished in 2010 to house the ethnographic collection. Its holdings, spanning customs, tools, furniture and leisure items, portray the two faces of this mining town of La Unión: that of the enriched miners who brought cosmopolitan airs, and that of the workers who sustained the mine through their labour.
Activity
The Festival Internacional del Cante de las Minas, the oldest flamenco competition dedicated to mining song, has been held in La Unión since its first edition on 13 October 1961, driven by the singer Juanito Valderrama and mayor Esteban Bernal. Born as a singing contest, it added a guitar section in the 1980s, a dance section in the 1990s and, since 2009, a fourth section for instrumentalists; it has been held at the old public market since 1978 and awards the Lámpara Minera as its prize. It commemorates the cantes minero-levantinos that arose in the 19th century in the Sierra Minera de Cartagena-La Unión, among miners who were mostly Andalusian. Declared of national tourist interest in 1984, it has programmed galas with Camarón and Paco de Lucía, and has brought singers such as Miguel Poveda to wider attention.
Activity
La Unión celebrates its patronal festivities in honor of Nuestra Señora del Rosario in October.
Activity
The patronal festival of Portmán, a coastal hamlet of La Unión (Murcia) and a former mining enclave, is celebrated in honour of Santiago Apóstol on 25 July, the main festive and religious date of the year in the town. Portmán's festive calendar also includes the procession of the Virgen del Carmen, on 16 July, of a maritime character, as well as carnival and Holy Week.
Activity
Summer festival of the hamlet of Roche, one of the two coastal hamlets of La Unión, in honour of its patroness, the Virgen de los Dolores. The earliest documentation of these festivities dates from the 1920s, and they are deliberately held away from Good Friday. Highlights include the Carreras de Cintas y de Pañuelos races, one on foot for children and another by bicycle or motorbike for adults, with ribbons hand-embroidered by the women of the village.
Monument
A church built in 1902 and known as 'the cathedral of the mining sierra', home to the patron saint of La Unión and the venerated Cristo de los Mineros; declared a Bien de Interés Cultural (Spain's highest level of heritage protection).
Curiosity
The Sierra Minera de Cartagena-La Unión stretches for 26 kilometres of coastline between Cartagena and Cabo de Palos, passing through La Unión, with its highest point on the cerro del Sancti Spíritus (431 m), near Portmán. Worked for its silver and lead mines since Antiquity, it attracted Carthaginians and Romans, who made Carthago Nova one of the most flourishing cities of Hispania until the exhaustion of the deposits led to its abandonment at the end of the 1st century. Activity resumed in the 19th century, and after the Civil War it moved to open-pit mining, with serious environmental problems, until it ceased in 1990. Declared a Bien de Interés Cultural (Spain's highest level of heritage protection) in 2009, it preserves hundreds of listed features — headframes, chimneys, washing plants, powder magazines — that bear witness to this process.
Monument
A Modernista house of the late 19th century, extended in 1913 by the architect Víctor Beltrí, home of the mining entrepreneur Miguel Zapata, 'El Tío Lobo'; declared a Bien de Interés Cultural (Spain's highest level of heritage protection) in 2002.
Curiosity
A former fishing bay silted up since the mid-20th century by tailings from the Roberto washing plant in the mining sierra, and now the subject of an environmental restoration project.
Historical milestone
A royal decree of Isabella II of 1860 detached from Cartagena the hamlets of El Garbanzal, Herrerías, Portmán and Roche to form a municipality of their own, born in the heat of the flood of immigrants brought by the mining fever of the range.
Historical milestone
The disagreements between the residents of El Garbanzal and those of Herrerías were settled in 1868 with a merger promoted by general Prim, out of which came the name of La Unión for the young mining municipality.
Historical milestone
The end of open-pit working put a final stop in 1991 to two millennia of mining in the range, begun by Punics and Romans; the landscape of pits, headframes and washing plants remained as testimony of a vanished economy.
Food and drink
A stew of homemade pasta made by hand with flour, water and oil, twisted into small grains that are cooked with rabbit and vegetables; it is a dish of the mining household, cheap and filling, deeply rooted in the sierra of La Unión.
Food and drink
Large meatballs of turkey meat kneaded with bread and egg that are cooked inside the pulse pottage, a way of stretching the meat in the kitchens of the mining settlement that survives in the municipality's festive meals.