Boltaña

Before the Romans arrived, the area was already the capital of a territory called Boletania — the root of the town's modern name. The Romans called their settlement Municipium Boletanum and placed it between what is now the castle hill and the Ara river. The Visigoth king Gundemaro minted coins here. The castle itself is Arab in origin, and by the reign of Sancho Ramírez of Aragon it was a key military post guarding against Muslim raids into the Sobrarbe region. As early as 941, the king of Pamplona counted Boltaña among his possessions, and the town's governors in the eleventh century were trusted figures close to the Aragonese crown — a sign of its strategic weight at the time.

That importance gradually faded. After Aínsa received a royal charter in 1124, Boltaña slipped into a long decline and was eventually reduced, legally, to the status of a dependency of its neighbour. A lordship was granted to Juan de Bardají in 1430, then revoked by Alfonso V after local resistance. By the mid-nineteenth century the population stood at around 236, and the town's economy turned on modest cereal crops, oil, wine, silk, fruit, and a handful of mills, ropemakers, and weavers.

The castle sits at the top of the hill known as Monte de San Martín and is popularly called the Castle of the Counts of Sobrarbe. Its origins are Muslim, but Lombard builders worked on it from 1017, and it retains an unusual hexagonal keep — rare in the region. Together with the castle at Abizanda, it is one of only two fully enclosed castles in the Sobrarbe comarca, and one of the first Christian fortresses there. It fell into ruin from the sixteenth century onward, and that ruin bred local legends: witches were said to hold their sabbaths within its walls, and a well was rumoured to connect the castle directly to the river below. A recent restoration has recovered the dressed-stone façade and entrance arch. It is listed as a protected cultural asset of Aragón.

Below the castle, the Collegiate Church of San Pedro is one of the largest churches in the Aragonese Pyrenees. Built in the sixteenth century over an earlier Romanesque church, it combines the Gothic Aragonese style with Renaissance elements, and its broad central nave is particularly striking. The Carmelite monastery, founded in 1651 on the site of an older hermitage, has been converted into a spa hotel; its severe, Herrerian-influenced façade dates to 1711.

The main square has been recently restored, and one of its houses retains a traditional arcade. The Casa de la Cultura, built around 1820, houses the municipal library — the oldest in the Aragonese Pyrenees and said to have among the highest lending rates in the region. Several medieval bridges survive in and around the town: a partly reconstructed medieval bridge over the Barranco de San Martín near the N-260, a bridge over the Ara river with a medieval arch, and the Romanesque Puente de Moscarales over the Barranco Ferrera at its junction with the Ara, reached via the A-1604 road towards Campodarbe and Lanave.