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The historic Arab-derived waterwheel beside the River Segura at Benijófar
Reviewed August 2026
Benijofar - Information

Benijófar: a small huerta village on the Segura

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Benijófar is one of the smallest municipalities in the Vega Baja, a flat parish of a few square kilometres pressed against the right bank of the River Segura. Its history is the history of the irrigated plain around it. It was created to farm the huerta, it is shaped by the river it depends on and it has been rebuilt more than once after that river and the ground beneath it turned destructive.

An eighteenth-century foundation

Benijófar stands on land that once belonged to the large term of Orihuela. The estate changed hands several times, including a spell under the Dominicans of Orihuela, before it was bought by the Gallego family in the late seventeenth century. The village was then settled under a type of licence known in the Kingdom of Valencia as the alfonsine privilege, which allowed a landowner to found a small feudal village by placing a fixed group of vassal families on a measured tract of land.

Benijófar Town Council dates the formal birth of the population to 1729, when Jaime Gallego de Castro established tenant families on irrigated ground to build houses and work the land. Some accounts place the founding a little earlier. The sources do not fully agree on the year or on the exact number of first settlers.

The name is older than the village. Benijófar is Arabic in form, built on the common bani element meaning "people of" or "sons of", followed by a second part usually read as a personal name. A popular alternative links it to aljófar, meaning seed pearls. Names of this kind are common across the huertas of Murcia and the southern Valencian Community and point to the Andalusi farming communities that worked this land long before the modern village.

Rebuilt after the 1829 earthquake

On 21 March 1829 an earthquake struck the Vega Baja and wrecked much of the district. Benijófar was among the settlements destroyed, and the seventeenth-century parish church was largely lost. Reconstruction across the comarca was directed by the engineer José Agustín de Larramendi, who laid out wide straight streets meant to be safer in a future earthquake and approved plans for dozens of new houses in Benijófar alone.

The rebuilt parish church is dedicated to Santiago Apóstol. It still keeps altarpieces and a tabernacle from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which survived the collapse.

The river as asset and hazard

Irrigation from the Segura is the reason Benijófar exists, and the town has always lived with the river's two faces. Channels drawn from the Segura water the citrus and vegetable plots around the village. The same river broke its banks in the flood of 1957, which swept through the Vega Baja, inundated Benijófar and cost lives here and across the plain.

At the edge of the built-up area, beside the river, a traditional waterwheel of Arab-derived design stands next to a low mill building and a small diversion weir. Together they form a compact piece of working hydraulic heritage. The wheel lifted river water into the irrigation network, the weir held the level steady and the mill used the flow. A local walking route, the SL-CV 135, starts in the centre of the village and runs out through the farmland to a recreation area and the wheel.

Visiting Benijófar

  • The parish church, the post-1829 central streets and the riverside walk to the waterwheel are the main sights, and they connect on foot.
  • The village lies on the CV-940 between Rojales and Ciudad Quesada, close to Guardamar del Segura, and pairs easily with a longer visit to a neighbour.
  • Let local signs and the state of the river decide how close you go to the bank, especially after rain.

Benijófar sits between two fuller Explore stories. Upstream, the hydraulic ensemble and cave quarter at Rojales show the same irrigation system on a larger scale. Downstream, Guardamar del Segura stands where the Segura finally reaches the sea.

Sources and review

This guide was reviewed in August 2026 using the Benijófar Town Council history pages, the Comunitat Valenciana tourism service and published research on the alfonsine lordships of the southern Kingdom of Valencia. Where the sources disagree on the founding date this is noted in the text.