Spain and Portugal for Visitors

The Mar Menor, Lesser Sea, is a salt-water lagoon in the south-east of the region of Murcia. It exists because of a long sandbar, La Manga, which closes in what was once a large, open bay and is now the largest salt-water lake in Europe, 170 square kilometres. The Mar Menor has over seventy kilometres of interior coast, including La Manga, which has another twenty-odd kilometres of Mediterranean shoreline on the other side of its breadth of between 100 and 1200 metres.

The Mar Menor is shallow (nowhere is it more than seven metres deep), very saline (you float high in the water), and warm, degrees warmer than the adjacent Med. Its waters are clear and blue, and it is even more tideless than the scarcely tidal Mediterranean. All in all, it is understandably a popular choice for water sports like sailing and windurfing or kitesurfing, particularly for learners. In addition, its beaches slope very gently into the sea, making them ideal for families with small children.

Its weather is dry and warm, making it eminently suitable for a winter break, and the only climatological feature which might put you off the Mar Menor is the sometimes scorching summer temperatures.

La Manga has been heavily developed - let's face it, overdeveloped - as a resort (which should not be confused with La Manga Club, a large, private, upmarket tourist complex to the south of La Manga itself), and it is just as well that its high-rise hotels and apartment blocks are far enough away from the western shore of the Mar Menor not to be excessively obtrusive on the eye. Work in progress on a new, ecologically indefensible marina in the north of La Manga has, thank God, been halted (again), the developer having shot himself in the foot by increasing the building planned to include over 2,000 houses and a golf course.

The towns around the Mar Menor, on the other hand, though dependent on tourism, do not have the same commercial feel to them, particularly in the north. San Pedro del Pinatar is a fishing town now dedicated to tourism, and Lo Pagan is an old-fashioned, low-rise family resort, famous for the salt-pan mud supposedly containing beneficial salts - people wallow in it obscenely. San Javier itself has the region's airport, while Los Alcazares in the south has the Mar Menor's smarter promenades and beaches.

Click here for Mar Menor opening hours, entrance prices, and how to get there.