Spain Roadtrip: Zaragoza to Teruel on the Mudejar Highway

By Max Milano (Travel Writer)

Aragon is a high, arid desert stretching from the Pyrenees in Northern Spain to the Ebro Valley and southward to Teruel and the Valencia border. It's hot in summer and cold in winter, when its red desert land is coated with snow. George Orwell served in Aragon’s badlands during the Spanish Civil War and wrote about how the machine gun nests on the hills looked almost beautiful in the winter snow.

It’s summer now, and we walk along a dusty dirt track surrounding the ruins of Belchite. I pause to examine an old Mudejar-style church, scarred by bullet holes and mortar blasts. Across the street lies a destroyed village—a vortex of torn bricks, adobe, and plaster piled behind barely standing facades. Empty balconies open to nothing but destruction. I snap a few shots with a 22-millimeter lens, wishing I had my zoom lens, but it’s back in the car.

Despite its ruin, the church retains a certain dignity and exoticism, especially in the intricate Mudejar decorations on its minaret-like tower. Arabesque designs in red plaster, stars, and geometric figures adorn the tower—once, these skills decorated mosques. In Aragon, history lives in buildings and landscapes, and nothing tells the history of this land better than this ruined church destroyed during the Spanish Civil War in 1937.

Belchite Destroyed

The savage ruins of Belchite rise from the stony land of Aragón like a scar on Spain's history.

In 1936, Belchite's socialist mayor was caught in a vortex. The emboldened Falangists were marching from town to town in the region, deposing socialist mayors, shooting them, and leaving their bodies in ditches. The mayor knew what was coming. He'd heard the stories from Ronda, where socialists had hurled their enemies from a bridge. He had no illusions about what would happen when the Falangists reached Belchite. Hemingway later wrote about Ronda in For Whom the Bell Tolls, but for the mayor of Belchite, no writer would record his fate in a novel.

The mayor was arrested and thrown into a cell with his wife, brother, and others who shared his beliefs. Facing the deaths of his family and townspeople, the mayor took his own life.

But Belchite's horrors did not end there. The battle to reclaim Belchite for the Republic became one of the fiercest of the Spanish Civil War. Republican forces, bolstered by the International Brigades—Americans, Canadians, Poles, Soviets—descended on Belchite, determined to retake it from Franco's men. Belchite's walls crumbled under artillery fire. The streets ran red with blood from house-to-house combat. The air thick with smoke and death.

Belchite. Destroyed in 1937.

We continue to walk along the perimeter fence that keeps curious tourists away from Belchite’s ruins. Guided tours are available online because it’s too dangerous to allow people inside the crumbling churches and houses. We had missed the early tour and couldn’t wait until 5 PM for the next one, so we walk around the fence instead, snapping pictures of twisted church towers and piles of rubble that bore witness to the savage street fighting of 1937.

In the Aragon badlands

Belchite burns

Under the sun

A town of ghosts

a ghost of a town

And Mudejar towers

riddled with holes,

In 1937

a civil war fought

International brigades—Americans, Polacks, Canucks

Fighting street-to-street

Dying horror-struck

Fighting for a cause

A town not their own

Belchite, Belchite, where fusillades roared

Belchite, Belchite

where the red armbands won

(but not for long)

Now Belchite lies broken

a scar on the land

and a testament to the blood

spilled on the red sand

"Never again, never this again," we said

But we keep repeating it in every place...

Belchite’s ruins even made a cameo in Guillermo Del Toro’s 2006 film Pan’s Labyrinth, providing an authentic backdrop to the Spanish Civil War-era story.

Belchite is no stranger to war. Founded as a buffer between newly reconquered Christian lands in the north and Moorish Al-Andaluz in the south, Belchite saw much conflict during the medieval period. It wasn’t just Moors versus Christians but also the ongoing power struggles among Aragonese kings, pretenders, usurpers, and their Carolingian allies in France, leading to many purges and killings.

One such purge is famously depicted in the "Bell of Huesca" painting. King Ramiro II decapitated several rebellious nobles, arranging their heads in a circle inside a dungeon and hanging the leader’s head from the rafters, making it swing like a macabre bell clapper. Ramiro II intended the decapitated heads to ring a warning across Aragon. This same idea inspired Franco to leave Belchite in ruins as a ghastly monument to the Spanish Civil War.

The Bell of Huesca Painting by José Casado del Alisal

Roadtripping in Spain

I love road trips in Spain because each journey is a learning experience. You never know what historical facts will emerge from the ruins and villages dotting the landscape: a Roman temple, a Mudejar castle, a town destroyed during the Spanish Civil War.

You’re almost forced to study Spanish history to understand what you see. Even the names of towns in Aragon reveal their history: Romanos (Romans), Mezquita de Jarque (Jarque Mosque), and Alfambra (Arabic for "the red one" due to the region’s red earth).

The Carthaginians and later the Romans valued Iberia’s red earth, rich in copper and gold. Roman mine shafts abound in Aragon, and some say Iberia, and later Hispania, was to Rome what Mexico was to Spain regarding wealth extracted from the earth.

We pass several mining towns along the Mudejar Highway connecting Zaragoza with Teruel. The road winds through arid badlands, then climbs to a forested plateau reminiscent of Arizona, with red earth and ponderosa pines. This high plateau is above the snowline but not high enough for dramatic peaks, so it rolls along with flashes of wooded forests and deep red ravines.

Medieval villages dot the landscape, some still encircled by city walls atop defensive hills. We resist the urge to stop at every village to explore their cobblestoned alleys. Experience has taught us that some isolated villages aren’t set up for tourism, and the locals are surprised to see American strangers wandering their streets during siesta, so we press on to Teruel.

The Mudejar Highway

We began our road trip in Zaragoza—Caesar Augusta during Roman times. Our hotel room featured a wall-sized copy of Goya’s La Gallina Ciega (The Blind Hen) behind our twin beds, which in Spain, are always pushed together to form a faux queen bed where I invariably fall into the crack at the worst moments.

I look at the beds and the oversized painting, which covered the wall like rococo wallpaper. The hotel’s name, "Hotel Goya," should have been a clue.

Hotel Goya, Zaragoza, Aragon, Spain.

There’s no better advertisement for a visit to the El Prado Museum in Madrid than a road trip through Aragon, where Goya’s influence is everywhere. You’ll find copies of his paintings and those of other Spanish masters whose originals reside in El Prado, including the gothic masterpiece La Campana de Huesca (The Huesca Bell) by José Casado del Alisal, depicting the gruesome scene of decapitated heads.

The Aragonese kings seemed to have a thing for decapitated heads; after all, their coat of arms displays four decapitated Moor’s heads arranged around the cross of Saint George.

We’re looking at the Aragonese coat of arms inside the magnificent Aljafería Palace in Zaragoza, built in the 11th century to guard the northern reaches of Al-Andaluz. The Aljafería features a moat and imposing towers, but its Moorish interior courtyard is world-class. It’s a mini-Alhambra with orange trees, Saracen arches, and intricately molded arabesque decorations on the walls.

The kings of Aragon and their Frankish and Norman allies expelled the Moorish rulers when they reconquered Zaragoza and took over the Aljafería Palace. But they fell in love with the Moorish decorations, preserving them and encouraging the creation of a new Arabic-inspired decorative art: Mudejar.

The Kings of Aragon also embraced the science and literature the Moors had preserved by translating Greek and Roman texts into Arabic. The Aragonese Christian kings discovered that the Moors had grasped the concept of "zero" and invented algebra, a significant advancement over Roman mathematics.

Some Aragonese Christian nobles even learned Arabic. The Moorish leadership had been expelled, but plenty of ordinary Moors were allowed to stay, and the local Christian population already spoke Mozarabic, a Latin-Arabic hybrid language, after being under Moorish domination for over 300 years.

Aljafería Palace, Zaragoza.

After the reconquest, and despite being segregated into Moorish and Jewish ghettos, the three communities of Jews, Moors, and Christians mingled in markets and public spaces, coexisting in Aragon for nearly 500 years until Queen Isabella expelled the Jews from Spain in 1492, and the Moors about a decade later.

The Aljafería Palace

dripping with moonlight

Shadows cast

in its interior courtyards

secrets whispered in a foreign tongue

the Saracen arches

delicate and dangerous,

the scent of orange blossoms

hanging thick in the air.

Ancient hands,

carved these walls, these arabesques,

a dance of stone and water—

And fountains

The King of Aragon

his eyes tracing the curves

Of the seductive arches

every orange tree

Full of forbidden fruit

The delicate lace of stone,

carved deep into the bones

where conquerors became conquered

in Zaragoza

We leave Zaragoza and head south on the Mudejar Highway. Into the red badlands we go. It looks like the American Southwest but with medieval castles. No wonder Sergio Leone filmed his Spaghetti Westerns in Spain. Red dirt, high desert, and windmills on long tabletop mountains—modern windmills, not Don Quixote’s. Then, out of nowhere, a medieval castle appears on the horizon, surrounded by a town clinging to the castle’s hillside. Spain offers no sprawl. One minute, you’re in the red Aragonese badlands, and the next, you’re on a cobblestone street looking at two-thousand-year-old Roman walls or a 1,500-year-old medieval castle.

The Mudejar Highway wears its history in its churches and towers of red bricks, decorated with green shards of pottery and arabesques in ochre plaster. You can’t tell where the minaret ends and the church begins; it’s a true blending of Romanesque and Moorish, with the Moorish details dominating. These towers could be in Morocco, and they wouldn’t look out of place calling for prayer in a red desert in North Africa.

The only surprise is that these Aragonese towers are churches, not the minarets they resemble. In Spain, history is written in the landscape and buildings.

Teruel

We arrive in Teruel by driving under its magnificent Renaissance aqueduct and footbridge. The city is built on the side of a terraced mountain, like jeweled steps carved into the landscape, capped by four large Mudejar towers above cobblestoned alleys.

We park our car under the town’s main square and walk up the alleys as the sun sets over the red badlands beyond. We stop at the sight of the magnificent tower of San Salvador, its red mud walls gleaming in the sun with green accents of polished pottery. Stars formed from triangles, tiny Romanesque pillars, and Saracen arches decorated with Arabic details create a strong effect—familiar yet exotic. This tower could be in Marrakech, calling for prayer, but it’s a Catholic church, in Teruel, Spain.

Mudejar architecture testifies to 500 years of coexistence among the world’s three monotheistic religions. It’s not surprising that a land once ruled by the Romans, with their multitude of gods, embraced three gods for three different communities.

San Salvador Mudejar Tower, Teruel.

Even when the Romans converted to Christianity, they hedged their bets by declaring their myriad gods to be "saints." Many people in Spain today believe in these saints more than in some monotheistic invisible god and his rabbi son on a Roman cross.

We enter the church beside the Mudejar tower and admire the intricately carved altar featuring a virgin and child, surrounded by angels and rococo carvings. If you plucked a Roman citizen from the year one and placed him in front of this Catholic altar, he would recognize the elements as intrinsically Roman: a vestal virgin, surrounded by baby gods (angels), and above, the Sun God. Constantine didn’t stray far from Roman traditions when he embraced the religion of those protestant Jews who called themselves Christians.

The Lovers

Teruel is famous for its dead lovers. The story closely mirrors Romeo and Juliet, making it hard to believe that Teruel’s lovers didn’t inspire the Italian tale from which Shakespeare borrowed the plot for Romeo and Juliet.

As the story goes, a fair maiden named Isabel saw her lover Diego go to war against the Moors in the 13th century. She was told Diego had died in battle and was forced to marry a man she didn’t love.

A few years later, her very-much-alive lover returned, only to find that Isabel had been married off. Heartbroken, Diego broke into her bedroom at night, begging for one last kiss "because he was dying."

Isabel refused, wanting to stay loyal to her husband, who slept beside her.

Denied his final kiss, Diego dropped dead.

Terrified, Isabel woke her husband, and they took Diego’s body to his relatives, fearing the husband would be blamed for killing him in a fit of jealousy. The next day, during Diego’s funeral, Isabel decided to give him that last kiss. She approached the casket, removed the funeral cloak, and kissed him. Diego’s sisters noticed Isabel draped over the casket and tried to remove her, only to discover she had also died on the spot.

The Lovers, Teruel.

As romantic as the story is, what happened to their bodies is even more over the top. Several centuries later, in the early 1500s, someone found two caskets buried in a local church and decided these must be the bodies of Diego and Isabel. Teruel’s dry, cold air had preserved them as mummies, which were promptly displayed in a church wardrobe for townspeople to visit. The story of the mummified lovers spread far and wide, even attracting King Fernando VII, who came to see them in 1814 on his way to reclaim absolute power in Spain after being freed by Napoleon.

The mummies remained on display until the 20th century, when someone created a pair of marble tombs with idealized statues of the lovers holding hands in death. Mudejar-inspired latticework carved into the tombs allows visitors to glimpse the dark mummies—their dry skulls contrasting with the beautiful marble above.

Ham of Teruel

Jamón Serrano is one of Spain’s culinary treasures, made through a strict process where pigs roam freely and feed on acorns. The hams are cured in salt for a year before being hung from rafters in the cool air of the sierras. Because Serrano ham requires a particular climate and breed of pig, there are only a few "denominaciones de origen" in Spain, with Teruel being one of them (the others are mainly in the Andalusian Sierras, and the highlands around Madrid, and Extremadura).

Ham of Teruel.

We walk to El Torico Plaza, Teruel’s charming square, an ode to paganism with its Roman column crowned by a tiny bull. The plaza is surrounded by jamonerías (Serrano ham restaurants) with outdoor seating. There’s nothing more Spanish than going out at dusk to enjoy the cooler air and meet your neighbors. It’s become our favorite hobby (my wife and I) to join the local senior citizens of Spanish towns as they go for their evening strolls and sit outside cafés for a drink.

Our waiter slices the ham from a large hock attached to a special Serrano ham cutting rack, carefully placing the buttery, acorn-flavored slices on a white plate. The ham is served with pan con tomate, a classic Spanish dish of toasted bread and fresh tomato paste. As we sip local draft beers and order espressos, we marvel at the dusky sky’s pinks and yellows against Teruel’s Mudejar towers. A Spanish road trip is always full of surprises and simple pleasures, repeated every evening as the sun sets and the old folks come out to greet their neighbors. Perhaps this is why Spaniards live so long. Or maybe it’s the acorns the Serrano ham pigs eat. In any case, every road trip in Spain is a voyage of discovery. Are you ready for one?

Teruel At Dusk.

Road Trip Tips

If you visit Spain on holiday, AutoEurope offers excellent rental car rates. If you’re staying in Spain for an extended period, as a digital nomad or expat, OK Mobility provides great rates for long-term rentals, up to 90 days—ideal for when you first arrive in Spain and need a car for the first few weeks.

Buying a Car

Buying a car is the best option if you plan to live in Spain. Spanish banks usually won’t give car loans to expats without payrolls in Spain, so buying a used car is a good alternative. I recommend going directly to the dealership of your preferred brand instead of used car chains like Flexicar, as dealerships generally offer better maintenance on used cars. Remember, automatic cars are more expensive in Spain, so learning to drive a stick can save you money.

Driving License & International Driver’s Permit

You can drive with your USA, Canadian, or UK driver’s license for six months after arriving in Spain, but you will need an international driver’s permit if you plan to stay long-term. You can ask your local AAA for one if you're from the USA. You’ll need a Spanish driver’s license if you plan to stay long-term. Stay tuned to GuiriGuru.com for an upcoming blog about the Spanish driver’s license process for English-speaking expats.

 Car Insurance

Ok Mobility and AutoEurope include insurance in their rentals, so purchasing car insurance only applies if you buy a car in Spain. Most Spanish insurance companies won’t sell car insurance without a Spanish driver’s license, but a few expat-focused ones will. We recommend checking out Abbeygate Insurance. Stay tuned for more blogs about car insurance on GuiriGuru.com.

Acknowledgments: Many thanks to Jose Antonio for his insight on the Battle of Belchite.

Stay tuned to GuiriGuru for more Spain explorations and weekly expat tips.

Max Milano is a travel writer and photographer based in Los Angeles, California, and Valencia, Spain. His latest photography book, Mexico City Noir, Life Under The Volcanoes, is Available on Amazon. Bookings and Prints of his photographs are available at MaxMilanoPix.