Lorca is a city and Spanish municipality belonging to the Region of Murcia, located in the Alto Guadalentín region in the southeast of the Iberian Peninsula.

It is the third population in importance of the Murcia Region after Murcia and Cartagena, with 91,730 inhabitants (INE 2016); of them, 58,825 inhabitants correspond to the urban area and the rest to its numerous districts, distributed throughout the length and width of the 1675 km² of municipal area, the second most extensive in Spain after that of Cáceres.

Lorca is known for its castle, its baroque architecture and its processions of Holy Week, declared a festival of international tourist interest.

Thanks to its dense heraldic heritage, it is also called “the city of the hundred shields”, a name given to it by the former mayor José Antonio Gallego, while from its original name (Eliocroca) it takes the title of the city of the sun. Its old town and the castle grounds, were declared historical-artistic site on March 5, 1964, being the first of the Region of Murcia with this distinction.