This panoramic view of the Calle Mayor shows the urban layout of the town’s main thoroughfare in the 1930s, with two-storey private houses, wrought iron balconies and even a quadrangular wooden belvedere overhanging the wide pavement on the right. In the background, the old church of San Pedro Apóstol and the public clock tower of the Town Hall, which seems to mark the daily life of the town, stand out.
In the foreground we can see a house which was the residence of the doctor Elías Artero Egea, with the advertising sign of the Mercantile Theatre, which was accessed from Calle Princesa and was connected by the Calle Mayor with the Círculo Agrícola Mercantil, owned by José Caride Lorente. This popular place of leisure and cultural expansion for the people of Alcantarilla was known as the “palacio de las pipas” (pipe palace). At the end of the 1930s it became the property of the Iniesta Company.
On the pavement to the left, there was a house built on a rise in the ground on a higher level than that of the Calle Mayor, on the corner with Calle Montoya. The solidity of its construction stood out, with a wrought iron balcony and a flared window, architectural elements from the early years of the 19th century.
In the background, there is a large three-storey house with a hipped roof, on the corner of Calle de la Amargura, now Calle Ruiz Carrillo. On the corner of the ground floor of the building, there was a grocer’s shop and, next to it, a small cabinetmaker’s workshop belonging to Manuel Muñoz, two of the premises that gave life to the intense commercial activity in the Calle Mayor.
In the 1940s, this street began to change its architectural physiognomy with the construction of three or four-storey private homes, such as the building on the corner of Calle Princesa, designed by the architect Joaquín Dicenta Vilaplana in 1944. Most of these houses are still preserved in the old quarter of the town, giving the main thoroughfare of Alcantarilla its character.
