A rare earthquake rocked an ancient town in south-eastern Spain on Wednesday causing houses to collapse, damaging historic churches and public buildings and killing at least six people. Some reports said the magnitude 5.3 earthquake sent tremors through the region of Murcia and had affected a nursing home and the tower of a church.
"Unfortunately, we can confirm ... deaths due to cave-ins and falling debris," the mayor of Lorca, Francisco Jodar, told radio station Ser. "We're trying to find out if there are people inside the collapsed houses," he said. A Murcia government spokesman said on the radio that six people had been killed. "We were just sat here and everything began to move, pictures fell from the wall, the TV fell and (the quake) went on for ages. We looked out of the window and there were a lot of people running, an ambulance and the police," one woman told national radio.
The earthquake struck at 6.47 pm, according to Spain's National Geographical Institute data. The US Geological Survey said the epicentre was one kilometre below the ground. Lorca, which has a population of about 90,000 people, dates back to the Bronze Age and probably gained its name from the Romans. The old part of the town is made up of a network of narrow alleyways.
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