Zaragoza: the Aljafería, the Mudéjar towers and Goya: a self-guided walk
By Alleytale
The Aljafería, the Mudéjar towers and Goya
Zaragoza is a city of brick towers: the Mudéjar towers of San Pablo, San Gil, San Miguel and La Magdalena, and the lost Torre Nueva, mark the old centre, while the sieges of 1808 and Goya's schooling and teachers are never far away.
The stops
The Banu Hud rulers of the Taifa of Zaragoza had this fortified palace built, the work mostly completed between 1065 and 1081, outside the Roman walls, and al-Muqtadir called it the Palace of Joy. After Alfonso I of Aragon took the city in 1118 it became a residence of the Christian kings, and today it houses the Cortes, the regional parliament of Aragon. In 2001 its Mudéjar remains, not the whole palace, were added to the World Heritage listing for the Mudéjar architecture of Aragon.
Photo: Stch2022 — CC0 Mariano Benlliure's bronze Agustina de Aragón, stepping on a cannon, was unveiled in the Plaza del Portillo on 29 October 1908 with King Alfonso XIII present, and its pedestal also honours six other heroines of the sieges of Zaragoza. The square is named for the Portillo, the old city gate that French troops stormed during the sieges of 1808, where Agustina is said to have loaded a cannon herself after the gunners fell. Goya shows her in plate 7 of The Disasters of War, titled What courage!
Photo: FRANCIS RAHER — CC BY 2.0 By the Middle Ages the San Pablo quarter had almost as many people as the walled centre, and in 1284 the old Romanesque chapel of San Blas had to make way for a new church. Its octagonal Mudéjar brick tower was finished before 1343 and is built as two towers, one inside the other, with a staircase between them. Later aisles wrapped around the tower, so it now stands inside the church, and in 2001 the church joined the UNESCO listing of Aragonese Mudéjar.
Photo: FRANCIS RAHER — CC BY 2.0 The Piarist fathers reached Zaragoza on 27 October 1731 and their school of Santo Tomás de Aquino opened on 19 February 1740, with its church built between 1736 and 1740. The city's tourism office says the painter Francisco de Goya learnt his first letters here, though the Spanish Wikipedia article on Goya says only that his first schooling was probably at this school, and the Spanish article on the school also names José de Palafox, later the general of the sieges of 1808, among its pupils. Only the church and the Palafox courtyard survive from the old building.
Photo: Alcorce — CC BY-SA 3.0 Here stood the Torre Nueva, a Mudéjar clock tower built in 1504 and, at 80 metres, described as the highest Mudéjar tower ever built. It leaned almost three metres, and in the sieges of 1808 and 1809 it served as a lookout over the French troops. The city council voted in 1892 to pull it down, despite opposition from intellectuals and part of the population, and a memorial from the 1990s traces its outline on the paving of the Plaza de San Felipe, with a sculpture of a boy looking up at where it stood.
Photo: Charles Clifford (1820-1863) — Public domain After the reconquest a Romanesque church was built here on an ancient Roman road; in the mid 14th century it was destroyed to build a Mudéjar church, later renewed in Baroque style in the 18th century. Its tower has a square plan and is built of brick. The sacristy, built between 1776 and 1779, has a vault fresco by Ramón Bayeu and seven paintings by Manuel Bayeu. They were brothers of Francisco Bayeu, the painter Goya studied with and whose sister Josefa he married in 1773.
Photo: Txo — CC BY-SA 4.0 The city's oldest museum fills a Neo-Renaissance building designed for the Spanish-French Exhibition of 1908 by Ricardo Magdalena and Julio Bravo, inspired by the Patio de la Infanta, once the home of the Renaissance merchant Gabriel Zaporta. Spanish Wikipedia says its Goya collection, of more than sixty works, is the most important in the world after the Prado and the Real Academia de San Fernando, both in Madrid. Goya himself began as a pupil of José Luzán in Zaragoza.
Photo: FRANCIS RAHER — CC BY 2.0 The church of San Miguel de los Navarros is a notable example of Mudéjar architecture, with a three-floor bell tower of decorated brickwork topped by an 18th-century spire like that of La Seo's tower. Damián Forment made the polychrome wood sculpture of its high altar. The Spanish article also tells of the Bell of the Lost: after a storm in 1556 that cost several lives, the city had a bell in this tower rung every half hour from dusk to midnight, and people still out wandering while it rang were nicknamed the lost, a tradition it says continues in a symbolic form.
Photo: FRANCIS RAHER — CC BY 2.0 This 16th-century house on the Plaza de San Carlos has a brick façade on a stone base, and the plaster decoration around its windows was finished in 1555. Nobody has confirmed who built it or who first owned it; the Morlanes, a family of jurists and artists who owned several houses in this area, have been suggested. Only the façade survives from the original, three storeys high and topped by a gallery of round arches.
Photo: Zarateman — CC0 The church of Santa María Magdalena is first mentioned in 1126 as a Romanesque building, and the present Mudéjar church replaced it two centuries later. Its square brick bell tower has four orders decorated with white and green tiles and resembles the Mudéjar towers of Teruel. The arches of its lower apse are in mixed styles that were perhaps inspired by the Aljafería palace.
Photo: FRANCIS RAHER — CC BY 2.0 This museum opened in 1979 as the Museo Camón Aznar and took its present name in 2015. It fills the Renaissance palace of the Pardo family on Calle Espoz y Mina, which in 1808, during the War of Independence, was the headquarters of the Captaincy General. It holds four series of Goya's engravings, Los Caprichos, The Disasters of War, La Tauromaquia (in its first edition) and Los Disparates, and Goya paintings that include a self-portrait of 1775.
Photo: Ajzh2074 — CC BY-SA 4.0
Hear the full story as you walk, or create your own walk, in the Alleytale app.