Lagunillas
Historic quarter of narrow streets built over old clay pits that once filled with rainwater.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Lagunillas in Málaga explains why this stretch of pavement used to flood every time it rained, starting with the clay pits dug into the hill of El Ejido to supply old Málaga's roof tiles and bricks. It follows how those abandoned quarry scars filled with standing water, dozens of small ponds that gave the neighborhood its name, long before a real street was cut through the marsh in the nineteenth century. You'll hear how that wet, muddy ground turned into one of the city's busiest markets, with stalls and mule carts rattling over ground that used to swallow footsteps. The clay is still down there, packed beneath the ordinary asphalt you're standing on.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Mercado El Carmen
Covered produce hall of fishmongers and fruit stalls rebuilt on a historically flood-prone riverside site.
Parroquia de San Pedro Apóstol
Single-nave riverside chapel raised for a working-class quarter cut off whenever the Guadalmedina flooded.
El Perchel
Fishermen's quarter of narrow streets, largely razed and rebuilt over the past century.
Soho
Riverside arts quarter of murals and galleries, once a rough dockland tamed after a catastrophic flood.
Mercado de Atarazanas
Nineteenth-century iron market wrapped around a fourteenth-century Moorish shipyard gate and a vast stained-glass wall.
Mercado de Salamanca
Neo-Mudéjar covered market with a tiled horseshoe-arch facade and twin domed towers, still trading in fish, fruit and bread.