From typicallyspanish.com
Murcia: the autonomous community
By h.b.
Oct 29, 2007 - 5:10 PM
The Murcia Region, or to give it its official title, the Comunidad Autónoma de la Región de Murcia, covers an area of 11,313 sq kms, making it the ninth largest of Spain’s autonomous communities, and comprising 2.2% of total Spanish territory. The Region has just one province, Murcia, with the city of that name acting as both the provincial and regional capital.
Population for the Region as a whole, according to the January 2006 census, is 1,370,306. The figure for the capital, Murcia City, is 416,966.
Lying in the southeast of the Iberian peninsula, it borders with Andalucía to the West (with Almería and Granada provinces), Castilla-La Mancha to the North (Albacete province – which was historically a part of Murcia), and Valencia to the East (Alicante province). Its southern border is the Mediterranean Sea.
Murcia’s first Statute of Autonomy was approved on 9th June 1982, and the first regional parliament, la Asamblea Regional de Murcia, was provisionally constituted on 15th July that year in Cartagena, where its seat remains to this day. The first elections were held in May the following year, with victory going to the Socialist Party, who led the regional government – the Consejo Regional de Murcia – for the next twelve years.
María Antonio Martínez García, although never elected to the position, was, in 1984 the first woman to become President of an autonomous community in Spain. She held the position for the Socialist Party again between 1993 and 1995 when her predecessor, Carlos Collado, resigned, but lost to the Partido Popular in the 1995 regional election.
The change in the political spectrum that year, with an absolute majority to the Partido Popular, was the party’s first of four successive victories in the Region. Ramón Luis Valcárcel has been President of the Murcia Region since then, consolidating the party’s position with a higher share of the vote in the 2007 election, and increasing his absolute majority by another two seats in the Regional Assembly.