Spain Roadtrip: Zaragoza to Teruel On The Mudéjar Highway

By Max Milano (Travel Writer & Photographer)

The day begins with dust, dry air, and a sun sharp as glass, even this early. Aragon opens on the road before us. We’re in high desert country. Red and ancient. Carved by history and silence. Orwell called it beautiful in the snow, even with machine guns on the hills. Today, it’s just hot.

Aragon is an arid, high inland desert that extends from the snow-capped Pyrenees Mountains in northern Spain down to the Ebro Valley and south towards Teruel and the border with Valencia. It’s hot in summer and cold in winter when its red desertic land gets a coating of snow. George Orwell served in the badlands of Aragon during the Spanish Civil War and got shot in the neck for his troubles.

It’s summer now, and we are walking along a dusty dirt track that surrounds the ruins of the town of Belchite. I stop and look at an old Mudéjar-style church pockmarked by bullet holes and with chunks torn off by mortars. There’s an entire destroyed village across the street from the church. A vortex of torn bricks, adobe, and plaster piled up behind barely standing façades. Empty balconies with nothing but destruction behind them. I snap a few shots with a 22-millimeter lens, and I wish I’d brought my zoom lens, but it’s back in the car.

The ruined church still retains its dignity and exoticism through the elaborate Mudéjar decorations on its minaret-like tower.

Arabesque decorations in red plaster featuring stars and other geometric figures adorn the church tower. Once the know-how of its Moorish builders, they would have been used to decorate the façades of Mosques, then of churches. In Aragon, history is preserved in its buildings and landscape, and nothing tells the story of this land better than this ruined Church and town destroyed during the Spanish Civil War in 1937.

Strange Bell

Aragon is no stranger to wars. Founded as a buffer on the frontier between the newly reconquered Christian lands extending north to the Pyrenees against Moorish Al-Andaluz extending south to the Mediterranean. It witnessed numerous conflicts during the medieval period, not only between Moors and Christians but also the ongoing power struggles between Aragonese kings, pretenders, usurpers, and their Carolingian counterparts in France, which led to many purges and killings.

One such purge is famously depicted in the “Bell of Huesca” painting, where one early Aragones king (Ramiro II) decapitated several rebellious nobles and arranged their heads in a circle inside a dungeon. The head of the leader of the rebellious nobles was tied to the rafters and made to swing at the center of the circle of chopped heads like a macabre bell clapper.

King Ramiro II wanted the decapitated heads to ring a warning as loud as a bell all over Aragon.

The First Blood of Belchite

Before the battle, before the bombs, before the streets ran red with war, came the killings.

In February 1936, the people of Belchite held a vote. The Socialist Party won. Mariano Castillo Carrasco became mayor. The town was small, just under 4,000 people. Farmers. Laborers. Teachers. Proud of their vote. Hopeful, maybe.

That ended in July. On the 18th, the generals rose against the Republic. War had begun.

In Belchite and across the comarca, the uprising came fast. Falangists and Guardia Civil took village after village. They pulled elected mayors from their homes. Men known to support the Republic were dragged into trucks.

They were taken to the outskirts. They were shot in the back. Or the head. No trials. No last words.

They called it a paseo, a walk. But no one came back from those walks.

At least 170 were killed in the area. In Belchite, they came for Mayor Castillo. They came for his family too. All were killed.

Teachers were shot. Farmers. Laborers. Even a man named Victorián Lafoz Benedí, a new mayor appointed by the rebels themselves. They shot him too, for refusing to go along with the killings.

The war hadn’t reached the town yet. But the blood had. The ground was already soaked before a single shell ever hit the church tower.

The Battle For Belchite

In August 1937, the Republicans were moving toward Zaragoza. They wanted a victory. A symbolic one. A loud one. But Belchite stood in the way.

By the 26th, the town was surrounded. Republican brigades and international volunteers cut off every escape. Inside, 5,000 people, soldiers, Falangists, civilians, waited behind barricades made of sandbags and rubble.

Artillery hit from the high ground called Cabezo del Lobo. The bombs fell hard. The planes came next. No water. No way out under the merciless bombs.

Men died in doorways. In chapels. In alleyways with their hands still clutching their rifles. Civilians hid in cellars. When they crawled out, there was no town left.

It took two weeks to take Belchite. Fourteen days of fire and ruin. Five thousand dead. More than 2,400 prisoners. The Republicans entered as victors.

But they didn’t hold it long.

Franco came back the next year and reclaimed the town.

He looked at the ruins. The twisted towers. The rubble where homes had been. He left it like that. No rebuilding. No repairs.

“Let it stand,” he said. “Let them remember.”

And so the bones of Belchite remain. A ghost town. A warning. A place where even the wind whispers of war.

We continue walking along the perimeter fence that keeps curious tourists away from the ruins of Belchite. It would be too dangerous to let people roam freely inside the ruined churches and houses.

They offer guided tours that can be booked online. We just got the times wrong and couldn’t wait until five PM for the next tour, so we just walk around the perimeter fence, snapping pictures of the twisted church towers and the piles of rubble that bear witness to the savage street-to-street fighting back in 1937.

The ruins of Belchite made a cameo appearance in Guillermo Del Toro’s 2006 movie Pan’s Labyrinth, providing an authentic backdrop to the Spanish Civil War-era movie.

Roadtripping in Spain

I love road trips in Spain because each road trip becomes a learning experience. One never knows what new historical facts will emerge from the ruins of the villages that dot the landscape: a Roman temple, a Mudéjar Castle, and a town ruined during the Spanish Civil War.

One is almost forced to study Spanish history to get one’s head around the sights before one’s eyes. Even the names of towns around Aragon give away details of their history: Romanos (Romans), Mezquita de Jarque (Jarque Mosque), and Alfambra (Arabic for “the red one” due to the red earth of the region).

The Carthaginians and later the Romans appreciated that Iberia’s red earth was rich in copper and gold. Roman mine shafts abound in Aragon, and some say that Iberia and later Hispania, as well as the wealth extracted from the earth and shipped to Rome, were akin to Mexico’s influence on Spain.

We drive past several mining towns along the Mudéjar highway that connects Zaragoza with Teruel.

The road slips along arid badlands and then climbs to a forested plateau reminiscent of Arizona, with red earth and ponderosa pines. This high plateau is situated above the snowline but not high enough to support dramatic peaks, so it rolls along, punctuated by flashes of wooded forests and deep, red ravines.

Medieval villages pop out of the landscape, some with their city walls still intact atop their defensive hills. We fight the urge to stop at every village to walk the cobblestoned alleys of their old towns.

We’ve learned the hard way that some of these isolated villages are not set up for tourism, and the locals find it shocking when a pair of American strangers walk around their alleyways during siestas when everything is closed, so we press on to Teruel.

The Mudéjar Highway

We’d started our road trip in Zaragoza. The Caesar Augusta of the Romans. Our hotel room featured a wall-sized copy of Goya’s La Gallina Ciega (The Blind Hen) behind our twin beds, which, in Spain, they insist on pushing together into a kind of faux queen bed where I invariably fall down the crack in the middle at the most inopportune moment.

I look at the beds and the painting that covers the whole wall, like a rococo wallpaper. The fact that the hotel was called “Hotel Goya” should have been a clue.

There’s no better advertisement for a visit to the El Prado museum in Madrid than a road trip to Aragon because, since Goya was born in Aragon, copies of his paintings abound everywhere. Additionally, copies of other old Spanish masters whose originals reside in El Prado, including the Gothic masterpiece La Campana de Huesca (The Huesca Bell) by José Casado del Alisal, featuring the gruesome scene of the aforementioned decapitated heads.

It seems that the Aragonese kings had a thing for decapitated heads; after all, their coat of arms displays four decapitated Moors’ heads arranged around the cross of Saint George.

The Aljafería Palace

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

The kings of Aragon and their Frankish and Norman allies kicked out the Moorish leadership when they reconquered Zaragoza and occupied the Aljafería palace. But they promptly fell in love with the Moorish decorations, so they kept them in the palace and encouraged the creation of a new Arabic-inspired decorative art: Mudéjar.

They also fell in love with the science and books that the Moors had preserved by translating Greek and Roman writers into Arabic. The Aragonese Christian kings discovered that the Moors had developed the concept of “zero” and had invented algebra, a significant improvement over Roman mathematics.

Some Christian nobles learned Arabic, even though the Moorish leadership had been ousted. After all, the local Christian population already spoke Mozarabic (a Latin-Arabic hybrid language), having been under Moorish domination for over 300 years.

Moorish kings were out, but some of the regular Moorish population remained. Despite being separated into Moorish and Jewish ghettos, the three communities of Jews, Moors, and Christians mingled at the market and public places, enabling their three monotheistic religions to coexist in Aragon for almost 500 years until Queen Isabella expelled the Jews from Spain in 1492 and the Moors about a decade later.

We leave Zaragoza and head south on the Mudéjar highway. Into the red badlands we go. It reminds me of the American Southwest but with medieval castles. No wonder Sergio Leone filmed his Spaghetti Westerns in Spain. Red dirt, high desert, and windmills up on long tabletop mountains (these are modern windmills, not the Don Quijote ones).

Then, out of nowhere, a medieval castle appears on the horizon, surrounded by a town spilling down the flanks of the castle hills. Spain offers no sprawl. One minute, you’re in the red Aragonese badlands, and the next, you’re on a cobblestone street looking at the two-thousand-year-old Roman walls of a 1500-year-old medieval castle.

The Mudéjar Highway wears its history on its churches and towers, which are decorated with red mud, green shards of pottery, and arabesques made from plaster and painted ochre red. You can’t tell where the minaret ends and the church begins; it’s a true blending of Romanesque and Moorish styles, with the Moorish architectural details prevailing. These towers could be in Morocco, calling for prayers in a red desert in northern Africa.

The only real surprise is that these Aragonese towers are actual churches, not the minarets they strongly resemble in terms of height, shape, and decorative façade. In Spain, history is written in the landscape and its 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 in the landscape, all capped by four large Mudéjar towers above cobblestoned alleys.

We park our car under the town’s main square and walk along 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 gleamed in the sun, accented with green hues of polished pottery. Stars made of triangles, Romanesque pillars, and Saracen arches decorated with Arabic details create a strong effect that is both familiar and exotic at the same time. This tower could be in Marrakesh, calling for prayer, but it’s a Catholic church.

Mudéjar Architecture is a testament to 500 years of coexistence of the world’s three monotheist religions. It’s not surprising that a land ruled by the Romans for centuries, with its numerous gods, would embrace three gods for three distinct communities.

Even when the Romans went Christian, they hedged their bets by declaring their myriad gods “saints.”

Many people in Spain today believe in these saints more than in some monotheistic invisible god and his rabbi son bleeding upon a Roman cross.

We enter the church next to the Mudéjar 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 1 and placed him in front of this Catholic altar, he would recognize all the elements as intrinsically Roman: a vestal virgin, a myriad of baby Roman and Greek gods surrounding her (angels), and above, the Sun God of the Romans. Constantine didn’t stray too far away from the Roman traditions when he embraced the Religion of those rabble-rousing Jews who called themselves Christians.

The Lovers

Teruel is famous for a pair of dead lovers. The story is so close to Romeo and Juliet that it’s almost impossible not to believe that Teruel’s star-crossed lovers inspired the Italian story from which Shakespeare nicked the plot for Romeo and Juliet.

A fair maiden, Isabel, as the story of the two lovers goes, sees her lover, Diego, go to war against the Moors during medieval times (13th century). She’s told her lover died in the wars and is forced to marry a man she didn’t love.

A couple of years later, her very much not-dead lover returns from the wars only to find out that his beloved has been forced to marry another man. Heartbroken, Diego breaks into Isabel’s marital bedroom at night and begs for one last kiss “because he was dying.”

Isabel refuses to kiss him because she’s married now and wants to be loyal to her husband, not to mention that the husband is sleeping in bed with her.

His last kiss denied, Diego drops dead.

Isabel, terrified, wakes up her husband, and they take Diego’s body to his relative’s house, fearing that her husband would be blamed for killing Diego in a fit of jealousy. The next day, during Diego’s funeral, Isabel decides to give him a last kiss, so she approaches his casket, removes his funeral cloak, and kisses him. Diego’s sisters notice that Isabel is draped over the casket and try to remove her, only to discover that she has also died on the spot.

As romantic and fabulous as the story goes, what happened to their bodies is even more over the top. Several centuries after the facts, in the early 1500s, someone found the two caskets buried in a local church and decided that these must be the bodies of Diego and Isabel. Teruel’s dry and cold air had preserved the bodies into desiccated mommies, which were promptly displayed in a wardrobe of a church for all the townspeople to visit. The story of the two mummified lovers traveled far and wide, even straining the attention of 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 in their ghastly exhibit until the 20th century, when someone created a pair of marble tombs with idealized statues carved upon the tombs’ lids representing lovers holding hands in death. A Mudéjar-inspired latticework, engraved on the sides of the tombs, allows visitors to glimpse the dark mummies, their dry, dark skulls contrasting with the beautiful marble carvings above.

Ham of Teruel

Jamón Serrano is one of Spain’s culinary treasures. It’s made following a strict process in which the ham legs are left in a salt box for one year before being hung from rafters in the cool air of the sierras (mountain range in Spanish). Because making Serrano ham requires a particular climate and a specific breed of pig, there are only a few “denominaciones de origen” locations in all of Spain, Teruel being one of them (the rest are mainly in the Andalusian Sierras and the highlands around Madrid and Extremadura).

We walk to El Torico plaza, Teruel’s charming square, and an ode to paganism with its Roman column crowned by a tiny bull (El Torico). The plaza is surrounded by Jamonerías (Serrano Ham restaurants) with outside 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 travel companion wife) to join the local senior citizens of Spanish towns as they go for their afternoon strolls and sit outside cafes for a drink.

Our waiter cuts the ham from a large ham leg attached to a special Serrano ham cutting rack and carefully adds the slices of buttery ham to a white plate. The ham is served with an accompanying plate of pan con tomate, a classic Spanish dish of toasted bread and fresh tomato paste. We sip our local draft beers and order a pair of espressos as we marvel at the dusky sky’s pinks and yellows against Teruel’s Mudéjar towers.

A Spanish road trip is always full of surprises and simple pleasures that repeat themselves every evening as the sun sets and the old fogies go out into the fresh air to greet their neighbors. This may be the reason why Spanish people live so long, or it could be the cereals that the Serrano ham pigs eat. In any case, every road trip in Spain is a voyage of discovery. Are you ready for one?

Spain Roadtrip Tips

If you are coming to Spain on holiday, AutoEurope offers great fares on rental cars to Spain and other European destinations. If you are staying in Spain for a more extended period, either as a digital nomad or an expat, we recommend OK Mobility. They offer great rates for long-term rentals up to three months, ideal for when you first arrive in Spain and need a car for the first few months.

Buying a Car

Of course, if you intend to live in Spain, the best idea is to buy a car. Spanish banks won’t give car loans to expats without payrolls in Spain (there are some exceptions for EU payrolls), so buying a used car is an option. I recommend going directly to the dealership of your preferred brand versus going to used car chains like Flexicar, as the dealerships do a much better job with used car maintenance. Bear in mind that you will pay a premium for automatic cars in Spain, so if you are interested in learning to drive a stick, you will save money when purchasing a used stick shift.

Driving Licence

You can drive with your USA, Canadian, or UK driver’s license for six months after your first arrival in Spain. If you intend to live in Spain for the long term, you must apply for a Spanish driver’s license. Stay tuned to GuiriGuru.com for an upcoming blog about the whole Spanish driver’s license process for English-speaking expats.

Car Insurance

OK Mobility and AutoEurope include insurance in their rentals, so this will only be applicable if you buy a car in Spain (or bring your own vehicle). Most Spanish car insurance companies will not sell car insurance without a Spanish driver’s license; however, there are a few expat-focused ones that will. We recommend looking into Abbeygate car insurance. Stay tuned for more blogs about car insurance on GuiriGuru.com.

For more offbeat, brutally honest travel stories and expat survival tips, head to GuiriGuru.com and start living Spain from the inside out.

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. His photographs are available at MaxMilanoPix.