Teruel: the Lovers and the Mudéjar towers: a self-guided walk
By Alleytale
The Lovers of Teruel and the Mudéjar towers
Teruel's legend of the Lovers and its Mudéjar towers, with their brick and glazed ceramic, share a few streets, along with the Renaissance water works and the early 20th-century engineers and benefactor who gave the town its staircase and its viaduct.
The stops
José Torán de la Rad, an engineer from Teruel, built this monumental staircase in 1920 and 1921 to join the railway station to the old town, 26 metres higher up. Its brick, carved stone and green and white ceramics draw on the city's Mudéjar architecture, and a high relief of the Lovers of Teruel by the sculptor Aniceto Marinas sits on the front of the small main landing, between the city's coat of arms and the fountain. The politician Carlos Castel, a great benefactor of Teruel, used his influence and his search for funding to help get it built, and the work took only about fifteen months.
Photo: igorre1969 — CC BY-SA 2.0 The Mudéjar tower of El Salvador is thought to date from the first quarter of the 14th century, judging by the judges' account in the Libro Verde de Teruel. Its richer decoration and more developed structure than the tower of San Martín, which it imitates, suggest it is the later of the two, built after 1315 and 1316. It is attached to a baroque church whose earlier structure fell apart in 1677, and its interior holds the Centro de Interpretación del Mudéjar, one of the few places to see the inner structure of an Aragonese Mudéjar tower.
Photo: Tagarino — CC BY-SA 3.0 Almost everyone calls this square the Plaza del Torico, after the small bull on the column of its fountain, though its official name honours Carlos Castel, the deputy whose influence helped build the Escalinata and the viaduct where this walk ends. The present fountain was inaugurated on 11 November 1855, and the bull alludes to a legend that the city began where a bull stopped under a star. The bull on the column today is a bronze replica, put there after the column fell in June 2022.
Photo: Fernando — CC BY-SA 4.0 Built in 1315 and 1316, this Mudéjar tower is a gate-tower decorated with glazed ceramic, and a road runs through an ogival arch at its foot. It follows the plan of an Almohad minaret, two square towers one inside the other with the stairs between them, and its lower part was restored in 1550 after damp had eroded it. The French architect Quinto Pierres Vedel, who had finished the difficult underpinning of this tower, was commissioned in 1551 to restart the work of bringing water to Teruel.
Photo: José Luis Filpo Cabana — CC BY 3.0 The cathedral grew from the church of Santa María de Mediavilla and became a cathedral in 1587, when the diocese of Teruel was created. Its square Mudéjar tower has three sides covered in glazed ceramic, and at its foot a barrel vault that passers-by can walk through. Inside, the 32-metre painted ceiling of the central nave, from the 14th century, has been called the Sistine Chapel of Mudéjar art, and its paintings of officers, craftsmen and fantastic beings are well preserved because an 18th-century false ceiling covered them.
Photo: Fernando — CC BY-SA 4.0 The museum fills the Casa de la Comunidad, a stone palace in Aragonese Renaissance style built in the second half of the 16th century, whose facade is topped by an arcade of fifteen openings with a loggia of Doric columns above it. The city bought the building in 1973 for its provincial museum, which was created in 1956 and opened here on 2 March 1987. The jewel of its collection is a set of 4th-century Roman mosaics from Calanda.
Photo: Joanbanjo — CC BY-SA 3.0 Before the aqueduct, Teruel depended on large cisterns built in the last quarter of the 14th century in what is now the Plaza del Torico, plus smaller wells and cisterns. In 1551 the council asked the French architect Quinto Pierres Vedel to restart a water project begun in 1537 and dropped for its cost, and to cross the ravine on the city's north-east side he designed Los Arcos, a two-level aqueduct and viaduct with six arches above and two below, finished in 1554. Water reached the fountain of the main square in 1558.
Photo: Turol Jones, un artista de cojones from Villanueva del Cascajal, República Independiente de Mi Casa — CC BY 2.0 This tower is what remains of the old minor castle, also called the Jews' castle, that stood at the top of the slope where Teruel's Jewish quarter grew. A Jewish community lived here until the expulsion of 1492, with a synagogue recorded by 1279, and by the taxes it paid it was the fifth Jewish community of the Kingdom of Aragon. Most of the quarter's houses were destroyed in the Spanish Civil War, but its narrow medieval street plan survives.
Photo: Zarateman — CC0 The legend, set in 1217, says Diego de Marcilla left Teruel for five years to earn a fortune and came back on the day Isabel de Segura was married to another man; he asked her for a kiss, she refused and he died, and at his funeral she kissed him and died too. Their mummies are said to have been found in the 16th century under a side chapel of this church, and they now lie in the adjoining Mausoleo de los Amantes, in tombs by Juan de Ávalos where Diego's outstretched hand stops just short of Isabel. The church's brick bell tower, decorated with glazed ceramic tiles, dates from the last third of the 13th century.
Photo: Turol Jones, un artista de cojones from Villanueva del Cascajal, República Independiente de Mi Casa — CC BY 2.0 The Teruel engineer Fernando Hué de la Barrera designed this viaduct, opened on 29 October 1929 so that the town could spread south over the Rambla de San Julián onto the plateau where the Ensanche now stands. Money problems stretched the work to at least seven years, and the help of Carlos Castel, then director general of public works, was decisive. Its deck, now for pedestrians, has railings carrying the coats of arms of Spain, Teruel, Castile, León, Navarre, Aragon and Valencia, and at the far end a monument from 1935 honours José Torán, the engineer of the Escalinata where the walk began.
Photo: Magnificus — CC BY-SA 3.0 es
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