Palomares is an agricultural, fishing and tourist village on the Mediterranean Sea in the Almería province of Andalusia, Spain. It is about 20 meters above sea level. The village falls within the municipality of Cuevas del Almanzora.
The ruins of El Artial lie just outside the village.
The town is noted for an incident in 1966 where a B-52 Stratofortress of Strategic Air Command crashed, causing radiation contamination after its payload of nuclear bombs was ruptured. There were four thermonuclear bombs in the plane. The high-explosive igniters on two bombs detonated on impact, spreading radioactive material, including plutonium, over a wide area of the Spanish countryside. A third bomb landed relatively intact and was recovered. The fourth bomb landed in the Mediterranean Sea, and U.S. military searchers took months to find and recover the device intact. In 2001 CIEMAT detected higher levels of plutonium, uranium and americium than average over 24 acres of Palomares.[1]