Plaza de Santa Isabel Murcia
A pleasant green space in the heart of Murcia’s shopping district
The Plaza de Santa Isabel is located half way along Gran Vía Escultor Salzillo in the urban heart of Murcia, a green oasis amongst the hustle and bustle of one of Murcia’s busiest shopping districts.
The plaza is shaded by a combination of established planting and purpose-built structures, under-planted with blocks of seasonal annuals and shrubs to create a cool and tranquil seating area, popular with locals and shoppers alike. Being right in the centre of Murcia’s shopping district and close to most of the main banks, it is almost always busy, and the plethora of nearby bars ensures that it is used until late in the evening.
The plaza houses several commercial premises, cafés and restaurants, a useful option to absorb the overspill from Plaza de las Flores and Santa Catalina during peak weekends.
The square is named after the Santa Isabel convent which used to stand on the site until it was knocked down in 1836, and has been re-designed and renovated various times over the course of the last 180 years. However, the monuments to Las Bellas Artes or La Fama have been constant features.
An interesting anecdote surrounds the name of the square: originally it was officially named Plaza Chacón, after Pedro Chacón, who was commander-in-chief of the troops stationed in Murcia and was named “Corregidor” (or governor) by Isabel II in 1835. His critics described him as an anti-religious extremist, and it was he who expelled the nuns from the Santa Isabel convent a year after his appointment and created the square.
The nuns moved to the convent of San Antonio until 1849, when they took up residence in the convent of La Purísima in the Malecón, but the inhabitants of Murcia were resistant to these changes and continued to refer to the square as the Plaza de Santa Isabel. Eventually popular opinion won the day, and the name of the convent has lived on through the Plaza right into the 21st century.
As a footnote, the La Purísima convent later became another victim of zealous town planners, and was also knocked down before the end of the nineteenth century.
Click for map, Plaza de Santa Isabel Murcia