In its own day this was the Arrabal de la Arrixaca Nueva, an outlying suburb of the walled medina. The word arrabal covers everything from outskirts to slum, but the reality here was leafier than that suggests. The land was dotted with almunias, country residences set among agricultural holdings and lush recreational gardens. As the excavation revealed, that pattern reached back at least to the twelfth century, spreading outward from the medina's walls along the roads leading out of town. The houses themselves followed the classic Islamic plan: a planted central courtyard, the main room set to the north, and an entrance that turned a corner before reaching the interior, so that no passerby could see straight into the home. Underneath ran something Murcia would not have again for a long time, a network of drains connected to a public sewer.

That buried plumbing is one of the site's quiet revelations. The Islamic city managed its wastewater through a coordinated system of drains, a piece of urban infrastructure that fell out of use after the Christian conquest. Murcia, the archaeologists note, would not recover public sewerage until well into the twentieth century. The houses tell a subtler story too. Judged purely as buildings, they are of medium construction, no grander than plots dug elsewhere in the city. Their value lies in scale and completeness, the chance to read a whole quarter at once, including a religious sector in the northwest corner with a burial ground and, most likely, a small mosque serving the neighborhood at the end of the thirteenth century. Read together, the streets, the drains, and the graves amount to a rare full portrait of a medieval quarter, the ordinary fabric of a life rather than a single grand monument.

The neighborhood's life was reshaped by conquest. In 1243, Ferdinand III of Castile made Murcia a protectorate, and Christian settlers began pouring in from across the Iberian Peninsula, encouraged as a loyal base. The pressure told. A Muslim revolt broke out in 1264 and was put down by James I of Aragon in 1266, who brought still more settlers with him. Alfonso X of Castile ordered the local Muslim population moved into the Arrixaca suburb as Christian settlers took over the former medina. These were families with homes, workshops, and gardens of their own, displaced within their own city, and the excavated quarter is in part a record of the lives they left behind.

Seven centuries later, the site nearly vanished a second time. The city hall had planned an underground car park exactly where the ruins came to light. In November 2009, some 300 artists and writers gathered in the Plaza Mayor and issued a Manifesto for San Esteban. A Facebook group in defense of the site drew more than 20,000 members within days. A university professor convened Sunday gatherings, forming a human chain around the ruins under the slogan Abraza San Esteban, embrace San Esteban. In December, roughly 5,000 people marched from the city hall to the site. The pressure worked: the car park was abandoned, and the remains were slated to become a protected cultural asset, held for the city that had refused to pave over its own past.