At 9:08 on Christmas night, 1884, the clock at the Real Instituto y Observatorio de la Armada in San Fernando stopped. Within minutes, magnetographs in Lisbon, Paris, Greenwich, and Wilhelmshaven registered the disturbance. Two observatories near Rome detected faint tremors just after ten o'clock. Somewhere beneath the Sierra de Tejeda, between the villages of Arenas del Rey and Ventas de Zafarraya, the earth had ruptured along a fault line that would produce a crack seven kilometers long, and the shaking that radiated outward would last fifteen to twenty seconds -- long enough to flatten entire villages where the buildings had no foundations and the walls were held together with mud.
The earthquake struck a region of small, poor, isolated mountain villages in the provinces of Granada and Malaga. Most houses were built without foundations, using lime or mud mortar and weak joints -- construction methods that had sufficed for generations in a landscape where destructive earthquakes occurred roughly every two hundred years. The estimated magnitude was 6.7, and the shaking produced soil liquefaction, landslides, ground cracks, and changes to spring flows across a zone 200 kilometers long. More than 10,000 buildings were badly damaged; 4,399 were completely destroyed. The villages of Arenas del Rey, Ventas de Zafarraya, and Alhama de Granada were virtually leveled. Over 1,200 people died and 1,500 were seriously injured. The death toll would have been far worse had Christmas night not drawn many residents into the streets to celebrate; the most destructive vibrations came near the end of the shaking, giving some people time to flee collapsing buildings.
Heavy snowfall followed the earthquake, compounding the suffering of over 15,000 people left without homes. Another 25,000 were forced from damaged buildings. They had to survive in open fields, mostly without shelter, in freezing temperatures. Aftershocks continued almost daily until May, one of them at 2:30 the following morning collapsing buildings that had survived the initial shock. The newspaper El Defensor de Granada published the first reports on December 26, but the full scale of the disaster was not grasped until the 27th. The civil and military authorities in Granada delayed sending relief until ordered by the central government, and no aid reached Alhama de Granada until January 4, 1885 -- ten days after the quake. King Alfonso XII of Spain rode on horseback through severe weather to visit 25 villages between January 10 and 20. He would die later that year, his health never fully recovering from the ordeal.
The earthquake drew an unusual response from the scientific community. Spain, France, and Italy each sent commissions to study the disaster, producing three independent reports that disagreed on nearly everything except the location of the damage. The Spanish commission, led by mining engineer Manuel Fernandez de Castro y Suero, concluded the earthquake was caused by underground water vapor pressure. The French commission, headed by Ferdinand Andre Fouque of the French Academy of Sciences, dismissed the atmospheric explanation and pointed to regional geology. The Italian team -- which included Giuseppe Mercalli, the seismologist who would later create the Mercalli intensity scale -- believed the cause was magma pressure in a region where the crust was too strong to allow volcanic eruption. The pioneering geologist Jose Macpherson y Hemas came closest to the modern understanding, explaining the earthquake as movement along the faults bounding the Tejeda-Almijara massif.
Reconstruction was funded by an international outpouring of donations totaling ten million pesetas. Barcelona alone contributed nearly 158,000 pesetas. The Catalan poet Jacint Verdaguer published a book of poems called Caritat -- Charity -- to raise funds. The most poignant story belonged to Ventas de Zafarraya, rebuilt almost entirely with money from Cuba, then still a Spanish colony. The village became known locally as "New Havana." In February 1885, the Ministry of the Interior solicited earthquake-resistant house designs, choosing five plans by the architect Mariano Belmas Estrada. The new villages were moved to stable ground with slopes under five percent, their streets widened to over ten meters, their layouts organized around large public squares that could serve as emergency gathering points. Between July 1885 and June 1887, 12,345 people received assistance in reconstruction -- an early, hard-won lesson in seismic building codes born from a catastrophe on Christmas night.
The epicentral area is located at approximately 36.95N, 3.98W, on the northern side of the Sierra de Tejeda in the provinces of Granada and Malaga. The villages of Arenas del Rey, Ventas de Zafarraya, and Alhama de Granada are scattered through mountainous terrain south of Granada. Nearest airports are Granada-Jaen (LEGR) and Malaga-Costa del Sol (LEMG). From the air, the Sierra de Tejeda range is visible as a prominent east-west ridge, with small whitewashed villages in the valleys below.