Albarracín
A genuine detour for travelers who love medieval villages. Stay overnight if you can — it empties out.
A pink-stone walled town on a cliff above a river bend, repeatedly voted among Spain's most beautiful villages. The color is unreal.
At a Glance
- — You're not driving in inland Aragón
Albarracín is a town of a thousand people stacked into a bend of the Guadalaviar, on the western edge of the Sierra de Albarracín — the high, thinly peopled limestone country where the Turia rises, in the far southwest of Aragón. The houses are built of local rodeno, an iron-stained sandstone that goes from rust to rose through the day; that colour is why people come, and why photographs of it look retouched. A wall climbs the crag above the roofs to the ruins of a castle, and the river has cut a gorge below that you can walk into. The streets are genuinely steep and genuinely slick in rain, which decides more of a visit than any list of sights.
How it got here
The crag has been fortified since Iberian times, but Albarracín's own century is the eleventh, when it gave its name to a small Taifa kingdom ruled by the Banu Razín — a frontier statelet that outlived the collapse of the Caliphate of Córdoba until the Almoravids took it in 1104. In the twelfth century it passed to the Azagra family, who held it as an independent lordship under the nominal overlordship of the Aragonese crown and struck their own coinage; the lordship was absorbed into the kingdom in the fourteenth century. That double inheritance — an Andalusi street plan under an Aragonese crown, governed by a family that behaved like a small state — is why the old town feels North African in its lanes and medieval Aragonese in its institutions. The walls, the Andador watchtower and the castle are what remains of it. The cathedral of Santa María, on the highest ground, was begun in the sixteenth century over an earlier church.
Where it sits
The Sierra de Albarracín is one of the emptiest corners of Aragón: pine and oak over pale limestone, sheep, and a handful of villages strung between Teruel and the Castilian border. Snow closes the passes in most winters and summer afternoons stay cool at this altitude. Albarracín sits at the middle of that country, and the surrounding landscape — the Pinares de Rodeno with its prehistoric rock shelters, the source country of the Turia, the trout rivers — is the argument for a night here rather than an afternoon. Day-trippers arrive from Teruel and Valencia late in the morning and are gone by six; what is left after that is the town.
What to eat and drink
This is Teruel's cooking, which is mountain cooking. Jamón de Teruel is the one product with a denomination behind it, cured in the province's cold dry air. Ternasco — milk-fed lamb, roasted hard with potatoes — is the plate to order. Migas a la aragonesa, fried breadcrumbs with garlic, chorizo and grapes, is the old shepherd's dish that survived. In autumn the pine woods of the Montes Universales give wild mushrooms, boletus and rebollones, and they appear on every menu in the sierra; in winter the black truffle of the Sarrión uplands is the province's quiet luxury. Cheeses and honey come from the villages around. To drink, Aragón's red is Garnacha, and the two serious denominations, Campo de Borja and Cariñena, lie a couple of hours north; locally the ritual is an aperitivo vermut in the plaza before a late dinner. Finish with suspiros de amante, the province's almond and yolk pastry.
Aragón: the whole region
Three landscapes in one region: the Pyrenees and their canyons in the north, the dry Ebro plain with Zaragoza at its centre, and the high, empty south where Teruel's villages and the Maestrazgo stand. It is the least-visited half of…
Minimum 4 days · better 7-8 days · deep 10-12 days
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