Mojácar la Vieja

You can watch archaeology happen here in real time. Every September, teams of researchers and local residents dig side by side on this pyramid-shaped hill, still working out exactly when a medieval Islamic community abandoned the site — and why.

The original Mojácar, abandoned and still not fully explained

Long before the whitewashed hilltop town most visitors know as Mojácar existed, its predecessor stood here — on a steep, pyramid-shaped hill overlooking the Río Aguas, a naturally defensible position occupied since prehistoric times. The remains visible today date specifically to the Andalusi period, when Islamic communities built a fortified settlement crowned by a large cistern, its walled town spreading in stepped terraces down the southern slope, defended by towers and a formal gated entrance. Formal archaeological fieldwork only began in 2018, led by the University of Granada, and it has been steadily filling in a story that isn’t fully written yet: current evidence places the settlement’s occupation between the 12th century and the early decades of the 14th, with abandonment sometime toward the end of that period — though researchers still haven’t confirmed exactly when the site was first founded, or precisely why it was eventually given up.

A dig where locals hold the trowels too

What makes Mojácar la Vieja genuinely unusual is how open the process has stayed. Annual excavation campaigns, run jointly with the University of Granada’s MEMOLab and international partners, regularly involve dozens of participants — researchers from Spain and the UK working directly alongside Mojácar residents themselves, some of them descendants of the community whose history they’re uncovering. Recent seasons have focused on refining exactly when the settlement was abandoned, and what daily life there actually looked like, using biocultural and archaeological methods rather than working from historical texts alone.

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