Travel Deals “FOUR years ago I would have told you that none of this would be possible here in Murcia,” said José Martinez Calvo, a native of this province in the southeast corner of Spain and a respected art dealer who owns the Madrid gallery Espacio Mínimo. “When my colleagues here told me what they were planning, I told them all to have a Plan B because this was just never going to happen.”
Well, it happened. On a recent afternoon, Mr. Calvo was standing in a lofty, light-filled gallery dotted with minimalist sculptures by the Irish artist Eva Rothschild at La Conservera, a converted cannery in the little village of Ceutí. Located 10 miles outside the regional capital city of Murcia — and a full five-hour drive southeast from Madrid — Ceutí feels light-years away from trendy, gallery-dense neighborhoods like Chueca in Madrid. But cleaned up and stripped of machinery, the factory’s open industrial spaces make spectacular galleries. And La Conservera, which opened last May, is just one piece of Murcia’s emergence as an artistic center.
Nearly a dozen new museums, galleries and other spaces devoted to creative use have popped up all across the often underappreciated province. Known as Spain’s vegetable garden — the region’s pata negra tomatoes inspire almost the same reverence as the jamón of the same name — Murcia typically makes national headlines only when there is a government battle over agricultural water rights or all-too-frequent real estate scandals surrounding development along the coast.
But in recent years, as government officials across Spain have succumbed to the so-called Bilbao effect — investing hundreds of millions of euros in shiny new arts centers in hopes that urban revitalization would quickly follow — Murcia has taken another road. Instead of putting all its cultural eggs in one high-priced basket, the local government is betting on a decentralized plan to spread cultural riches throughout the province.
The region is also exploiting raw materials: a considerable inventory of abandoned factories, Art Nouveau mansions, convents and churches just waiting for a second life. With renovation costs and start-up budgets that average well under 10 million euros a project, these properties have become the architectural equivalent of found objects converted to high art.
Art is not a new concept in Murcia, where a rich cultural heritage includes Neolithic cave paintings and Roman mosaics, not to mention things that just turn up, like the vast complex of Moorish ruins recently uncovered when construction began on a parking garage. In such an environment the art of today can seem like a blip on the radar.
“The important thing has been to strike a balance between the avant-garde of today and preservation of the past, our patrimony,” said Pedro Alberto Cruz, the culture and tourism minister for the regional government.
With its deep Moorish influences — increasingly resonant as immigration from Northern Africa has swelled — the influence of Islamic art in Murcia is highlighted by the intersection of old and new. Among the successful recent exhibitions was the installation of Anish Kapoor’s “Islamic Mirror,” a faceted concave mirror that reflects a mosaic-like display of countless tiny images, in the Sharq al-Andalus hall of Murcia’s Santa Clara Convent.
Founded by the Moors in the early ninth century, Murcia has all the charms one expects from a midsize Spanish city (population about 430,000) — a massive cathedral with a floridly Baroque façade, rows of colorful houses with elaborate balconies and lots of plazas shaded by orange trees and lined with cafe tables. A lazy river, the Segura, drifts beneath picturesque bridges that link its historic center with more recent barrios on the southern bank. It is in these neighborhoods that exhibition spaces like Espacio AV and cutting-edge commercial galleries like T20, which focuses on emerging artists, share narrow cobbled streets with traditional bakeries and basket weavers.
In the creative spirit of the city, one of the biggest events this year isn’t happening in a gallery, but rather in the Sala Verónicas, a deconsecrated church sandwiched between the remains of Murcia’s 12th-century Moorish wall and the city’s busy produce market. The second edition of the PAC Murcia Biennial, which opened on Jan. 25, is titled “Dominó Caníbal” (“Cannibal Domino”), a reference to how the exposition’s seven successive installations consume and reinterpret one another; each artist will base his or her installation on the one prior so that common thematic and material threads become inevitable.