Name "Almeria" comes from the city's former Arabic name, Madinat al-Mariyya, meaning "city of the watchtower".
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13 Facts About Almeria
2.
Origin of Almeria is connected to the 9th-century establishment of the so-called Republic of Pechina some kilometres to the north, which was for a time autonomous from the Cordobese central authority: the settlement of current-day Almeria initially developed as a humble trading port of Pechina known as Al-Mariyya Bajjana.
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3.
Almeria became an important slave trade hub during the caliphal period.
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5.
Almeria soon passed by the temporary overarching control of rebel Murcian emir Ibn Mardanish, hindering the early efforts of recovery in the city, that under the decade of Christian occupation reportedly had been left depopulated and, by and large, quite destroyed.
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6.
Almeria endured a brutal siege by Aragonese forces in 1309 that, while eventually unsuccessful, left the city battered.
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7.
Almeria surrendered in 1939, being the last Andalusian main city to fall to Francoist forces.
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8.
Famous natives of Almeria include Nicolas Salmeron y Alonso, who in 1873 was the third president of the First Spanish Republic, as well as several musicians, including the composer Jose Padilla Sanchez, whose music was declared of "universal interest" by Unesco in 1989, the popular folk singer Manolo Escobar, renowned Flamenco guitar player Jose Tomas "Tomatito" and Grammy Award winner David Bisbal; the champion motorcyclist Antonio Maeso moved to Almeria as a child.
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9.
The city has 2 football teams: UD Almeria, which was promoted to La Liga, the top tier of Spanish football, in 2022 and CP Almeria, which plays in the Division de Honor, the sixth tier.
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10.
Currently the port of Almeria is being expanded with new docks and transformed into a container port to take large-scale international shipping and thereby increase its freight traffic.
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11.
Almeria has one islet that it administers as a part of its territory in the Alboran Sea, Alboran Island.
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12.
Almeria enjoys about 3,000 hours of sunshine with over 320 sunny days per year on average so it is one of the sunniest cities in Europe.
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13.
Almeria is unique, for a city in Continental Europe, for not having any registered temperature under the freezing mark in its recorded weather history.
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