Mazarrón beaches: Playa de la Pava

The Playa de la Pava is a small, curving beach located in a  semi-urban environment. 

The Playa de la Pava is an urban Mediterranean beach, one of a line of 33 along the 35-kilometre coastline of Mazarrón between the municipalities of Cartagena and Lorca.

It is 2.2 kilometres from the centre of Puerto de Mazarrón and is easily accessed from Avenida D.José Alarcón Palacios, which forms part of the long coastal road linking the town to Bolnuevo.

This area is lined with residential houses and apartments, with a number of small dead-end streets running off the main road down to the edge of the beach. These provide plenty of parking, although during the summer, when the population of the municipality swells from 30,000 to 150,000, space does become limited. There are also bicycle racks and some spaces allocated for disabled parking, although during the summer there’s very little chance of finding one unoccupied.

The beach is also serviced by the urban bus on the urban Mazarrón-Murcia route. For the latest timetable and further information go to the dedicated Mazarrón municipality section (see Tourist info for bus timetables).

This beach runs from the Punta de Gavilanes to the Punta de Nares and cuts right to the edge of the roadside, where there is a limited amount of parking space.

It’s a small bay but is packed with history: at one end is the viewing point on the headland of Punta de Gavilanes, which is an important archaeological site used by successive cultures, with remains dating back to around 1900 BC. This rock was used to smelt minerals which were traded by the Phoenicians 600 years before the birth of Christ, some of which were recovered 2600 years later when the wreck of one of these Phoenician boats was found beneath the waters of the Playa de la Isla.

There is little to actually see today of the archaeological sites, but the viewing point itself offers superb views across the coastline.

At the other end of the beach are the remains of another Mazarrón industry in the distant parts: the "salinas", or salt ponds.

These produced salt by draining seawater into vast flat pans, which dried out in the sun to leave the salt behind. Most of these flats are now themselves buried beneath the residential developments which fringe this area of the coast, but in the corner of this beach the original inlet channels which would have fed a vast area of salinas can still be seen. A mechanical pump pushed the water out into the salinas, feeding them from this inlet system.

The beach

The beach is 100 metres long, by 29 metres wide, and even though there are larger sandy beaches to either side it attracts its fair share of the visitors, as the sand is fine and soft.

To the left as you look out to sea is the vast Playa de la Reya and to the right the equally large Playa de Nares.

During the summer it´s a busy beach, due to the quantity of apartments nearby, so has footwash facilities and children’s play areas. There are plenty of restaurants and cafés within easy distance of the beach and more extensive services on neighbouring beaches.

Click for an overview of all 33 beaches in the municipality of Mazarrón, or for more information relating to Mazarrón.