Murcia

A garden city of Muslim Spain on the Segura River, ringed by orchards the Arabs called huertas. Ibn Arabi was born here in 1165 before his family moved to Seville; visions in his teens set him on the long journey east through Mecca to Damascus. The greatest of Sufi metaphysicians kept the name of his birthplace to the end: al-Mursi, the man from Murcia.

Murcia lay in a river valley that Muslim engineers had turned into orchard by an irrigation system still partly in use. Ibn Arabi was born there in 1165, moved to Seville as a child, and had the visionary experiences that redirected his life while still a teenager. He left the peninsula for good in his thirties and travelled through Mecca to Anatolia and Syria, producing a body of work so large and so strange that later readers tended either to revere it or to condemn it outright.