Los Alcázares

The water is ankle-deep for fifty metres out. Toddlers waddle past your shins, pensioners shuffle backwards towing lilos, and a teenage windsurfer simply stands there waiting for breeze. This is the Mar Menor, Europe's largest salt lagoon, and Los Alcázares spreads along its western shore like a resort that never quite believed its own publicity brochures.

Six metres above sea level at its highest point, the town has no hills to climb, no cliffs to negotiate, no twisting medieval lanes to get lost in. What it does have is seven kilometres of sand graduated like a gentle entry ramp into warm, hyper-saline water that keeps you afloat with minimal effort. British grandparents compare it to a giant bath; their grandchildren just notice they can swim before they can reach the red-and-white striped swimming flags.

The promenade strings everything together. Start at the fishermen's cottages in Los Narejos and you can wheel a push-chair all the way to the old naval radio station at the southern tip without hitting a single kerb. Morning joggers overtake Nordic walkers; by late afternoon the same strip turns into an open-air zimmer-frame grand prix as the silver-pound brigade emerge for two-for-one happy hours. The council refreshes the tarmac every spring, which explains why cyclists outnumber cars along most of the front.

Salt, Sunsets and Saturday Market

Arab engineers once scraped salt from shallow pans behind the beach; the name Los Alcázares still carries their ghost. What they left behind is a bird-haunted wilderness of reeds and glinting water where flamingos arrive each winter to feed on brine shrimp tinted pink by the same algae that turned the lagoon crimson last summer. Walk the wooden boardwalk at sunrise and you'll share the view with only a handful of photographers and the occasional dog-walker pretending not to notice the nudist who camps at the far end.

The Tuesday and Saturday street market is less romantic but more useful. Stalls open at nine sharp between the fairground and the municipal pool, selling peppers the size of cricket balls, knock-off Liverpool shirts and leather belts that soften after a week. Bring cash; the nearest cash machine hides inside the Consum supermarket two blocks back, and the stallholders treat cards like contagious disease.

Evenings belong to the sunset. Because the lagoon faces west, the sky performs daily theatre that begins gold and ends bruise-purple, reflected so perfectly you can watch it twice if you turn round fast enough. The council built a concrete pier specifically for the purpose; local teenagers use it for snogging, everyone else for Instagram.

What the Brochures Don't Mention

August is noisy. Spanish families arrive with cool boxes, sound systems and enough cousins to fill a coach, then stay up arguing until two. If you want quiet, book May or late September when the water still hovers round 24 °C but the population halves. Winter works too: even January afternoons hit 17 °C, though the wind can slice straight through a fleece once the sun drops.

The beach shelves so gradually that jet-skis can't get within 200 metres of shore, which is brilliant for swimmers and maddening for teenagers who want to pose. The flip side is seaweed accumulation after easterly storms; tractors rake the sand most mornings, but the smell of rotting algae lingers until the council truck removes it. Pack beach shoes anyway – occasional sea-urchins colonise the stonier patches near the yacht club.

Los Alcázares is not cute. Concrete apartment blocks from the 1970s line the seafront, painted in colours that looked cheerful during Franco's final years and have since bleached to sun-scorched peach. The old town amounts to two streets and a plaza around the Church of Our Lady of the Assumption; pleasant enough for ten minutes, but nobody flies 1,500 miles to look at a brick bell-tower. What saves the place is scale: nothing rises above five storeys, so the sky still dominates and the lagoon remains visible from almost every balcony.

Eating Without the Performance

Restaurant choice clusters in three strips. Down by the yacht club, Spanish families queue for El Chato's caldero, the local fish-and-rice stew cooked in an iron pot and served in strict sequence: first the broth, then the rice, then the ali-oli you stir in for courage. Expect €18 a head and a waiter who refuses to speak English on principle. Move inland to Plaza de la Constitución for tapas at half the price and twice the volume; the bars here compete with each other, not with TripAdvisor. Further north, the Los Narejos front swerves international: curries, full English breakfasts, and a Yorkshire-owned chippy that imports frozen haddock because the local catch "tastes too fishy".

Drinking is simpler. Most bars are just restaurants with the lights dimmed; if you want live music, turn up on Friday when the Irish pub wheels out a guitarist who used to tour with Thin Lizzy's roadie. Otherwise buy a litre of Mahou from the Spar, sit on the sea wall and watch the fishing boats blink their way home across water the colour of burnt copper.

Getting Here, Getting About

Murcia-Corvera airport sits twenty minutes away by taxi (€30 fixed fare; they don't haggle). If flights are full, Alicante is an hour up the motorway on the new toll road – worth the €9 to skip the urban sprout of Murcia city. Car hire is useful only for day trips: Cartagena's Roman theatre, the hillside fortress at Lorca, or the wine cooperative in Bullas where you fill five-litre plastic containers for less than the price of an airport sandwich.

Inside the resort everything is flat. Local buses exist but run to Spanish logic: twice in the morning, siesta all afternoon, one final circuit at teatime. Most visitors walk or cycle; bike rental shops charge €8 a day and will lend you a lock nobody bothers using. Wheelchair users praise the dropped kerbs and disabled showers at Playa de las Palmeras, though the wooden walkways stop short of the water itself – someone still has to push across the last ten metres of sand.

The Honest Verdict

Los Alcázares will never win beauty contests. It doesn't do dramatic cliffs, whitewashed villages or Moorish castles on hilltops. What it delivers instead is practical comfort: warm shallow water, 320 days of sun, and enough British residents that you can find HP sauce when homesickness strikes. The risk is returning home relaxed but unable to describe where you've been – "somewhere near Murcia with a big lagoon" doesn't quite capture the sight of flamingos flying past your breakfast terrace. Still, if the goal is to float weightlessly while reading a paperback, then eat seafood without taking out a second mortgage, this stretch of Spanish coast achieves exactly that. Just don't expect to write postcards that sound exotic.