Jaca

Long before the Romans arrived, Jaca was the main settlement of the Iacetani, a people described by the Greek historian Strabo as occupying land from the Pyrenean foothills down to the plains. The Roman consul Marcus Porcius Cato took the city by a trick in 194 BC, positioning the Iacetani's enemies, the Suesetani, at the gates to lure the defenders out, then seizing the unguarded town. Under Rome it became a watch-post on the Pyrenean roads and prospered until late antiquity.

After the Arab conquest, the Pyrenean valleys preserved Christian territory under Carolingian protection. Around 920, Galindo II Aznárez repopulated Jaca as part of the county that would become the Kingdom of Aragón — at that point little more than a fortified hamlet with a few farms and a monastery dependent on Siresa. Its position below the Somport pass, one of the most accessible routes into France since ancient times, and its place on the Camino de Santiago gave it growing strategic weight.

When Sancho Garcés III of Pamplona died in 1035, his son Ramiro became Ramiro I of Aragón and made Jaca his royal residence, placing the Aragonese bishopric near the monastery of San Pedro, beginning the town's most consequential chapter.

Jaca's cathedral, built from 1077 on the orders of King Sancho Ramírez, is considered the first Romanesque cathedral in Spain. It has kept its original layout — a three-nave basilica with five bays, matching apses, two doorways, and a slender dome. The main portal opens from a barrel-vaulted porch and carries a tympanum with a Christogram. Inside, the Diocesan Museum of Romanesque Art, opened in 1970, holds a large fresco cycle sometimes called the Sistine Chapel of the Romanesque, running from the creation of Adam to the Ascension of Christ and regarded as one of the finest surviving bodies of Romanesque painting.

Other churches worth knowing: the Carmen church is the only remnant of a Discalced Carmelite convent, built in the first half of the seventeenth century with a Latin-cross plan. The Santiago church, also known as Santo Domingo, served a Dominican convent from 1614 to 1835. The Benedictine monastery known as Las Benitas was founded in 1555 in a sober Renaissance style; it has been closed since 2025.

The Citadel of Jaca — the Castillo de San Pedro — is the only fully intact fortification of its type surviving in Europe, restored since 1968, and houses a Museum of Military Miniatures with over 35,000 lead figures arranged across 23 themed battle scenes, plus a dedicated mountain-troops gallery and a temporary exhibition space.