San Fulgencio and La Marina: a drained huerta and a coast just beyond it

San Fulgencio is a small municipality in the Vega Baja, on the south side of the River Segura near its mouth, between Guardamar del Segura and Elx. It has two centres of gravity: the old village in the huerta and, towards the coast, the much larger La Marina urbanisation. The registered population is around 8,000, but it rises and falls with a large foreign-resident community, and in summer the coastal side is far busier than the village.

Drained from the marsh

The land near the river mouth was once a belt of almarjales, brackish marshes considered unhealthy and unusable. In 1729 Cardinal Luis Belluga, bishop of Cartagena, founded San Fulgencio as part of a scheme of pious foundations, the Pías Fundaciones, that drained the marshes into farmland and settled families on them. The village received the status of royal town from Felipe V and took its name from Saint Fulgentius of Cartagena. Dolores and San Felipe Neri were founded in the same project. Early settlers came from the Segura basin and Murcia, and by 1794 the village had grown to about 1,215 people. The 1829 Vega Baja earthquake damaged it, as it did the whole plain.

The huerta village today

The old centre is a modest grid around the parish church of San Fulgencio, still surrounded by irrigated fields on land that was reclaimed from the marsh and can still flood. It is the administrative and civic heart of the municipality even though most residents now live nearer the coast.

Iberian El Oral and La Escuera

On a low spur of the Sierra del Molar, around 40 metres above the plain, lie two Iberian sites. El Oral is an early Iberian settlement, laid out on a regular plan and occupied for only a few generations around the end of the sixth and the first half of the fifth centuries BC. It was built after the Phoenician trading post of La Fonteta, on the Guardamar side of the river, had been abandoned, and its straight streets and mud-brick houses show clear Phoenician and Punic building influence. It has been excavated and published by the University of Alicante, principally by Lorenzo Abad Casal and Feliciana Sala Sellés. La Escuera, closer to the river, is somewhat later. Finds from both are held in the municipal archaeological museum.

La Marina

From the 1980s a large, low-rise urbanisation grew on the pine and dune land between the village and the sea. La Marina is now one of the most international communities on the Costa Blanca, with a resident population drawn heavily from Britain and northern Europe. The older village of La Marina and the newer urbanisation on higher ground are separate places with the same name, which can confuse first-time visitors.

The beach that is not quite San Fulgencio's

The sand at La Marina and El Pinet, with its dunes and Aleppo pines, is a short distance from the urbanisation but lies within the municipal boundary of Elx rather than San Fulgencio. El Pinet has small salt pans and a birdwatching interest that connects, along the coast, with the wetlands at Santa Pola further north. The dune and pine strip is protected and links on foot to the forest at Guardamar.

Visiting San Fulgencio

• The village, the church and the archaeological museum are inland, off the CV-905.
• La Marina and the beaches are towards the coast on either side of the N-332, between Guardamar and the Elx boundary.
• The Sierra del Molar sites are best understood through the museum before visiting the ground.

San Fulgencio joins the chain of river-mouth places. Guardamar del Segura holds the north bank and the Phoenician site that El Oral replaced, and Torrevieja and its salt lakes lie south along the coast.

Sources and review

Reviewed in August 2026 using the Comunitat Valenciana tourism service, San Fulgencio's municipal information, the Spanish-language Wikipedia article on the municipality and University of Alicante publications on the Iberian sites of El Oral and La Escuera. Dating of the Iberian settlement follows the excavators and is approximate. Population and access details change, so confirm current information before travelling.