Murcia

The frontier city was not spared the plague, which struck in 1348 and again in 1395, when it carried off half the town, and Murcia was slow to recover. Its fortune came at last from Granada's misfortune. When the Morisco revolt of the 1560s wrecked the silk trade of Granada, the mulberry groves of the Murcian huerta took its place, and by 1591 the city held some 16,000 people, more than most towns of Castile. Early in the next century the city built a silk exchange, though the expulsion of the Moriscos in 1613 had already cost the growers many of their most skilled hands. Then the river that fed the huerta turned on it: after plague returned in 1648, the Segura burst its banks in the San Calixto flood of 1651 and killed more than a thousand people.