Spain experiences an average of over a thousand earthquakes every year. Everyone bar seismologists remain blissfully unaware of the vast majority of the violent shifts going on beneath our feet. A tiny fraction of these shifts cause us to pause for a second and wonder what is making the lights sway. An even tinier fraction cause damage. An even tinier fraction, still, cause injury or death.
Earthquakes of magnitude 5 rarely cause damage or death - Spain has actually had 9 earthquakes in the past year of the same intensity or greater than Lorca. Such earthquakes are 100 times less energetic, for example, than both the 7.3 Huelva quake of 1969 in which 19 people died, and the hugely destructive 7.0 Granada quake of 1954.
Southern and eastern Spain - like Italy, Greece, etc – lies on the boundary between the European and African tectonic plates. This leads to frequent seismic activity (the Pyrenees and Galicia also lie on faults, and also get a high number of seismic events). There have, in fact, been 27 events registered on mainland Spain in the past 10 days alone.
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