Cantavieja

Legend claims Cantavieja was founded by the Carthaginian general Hamilcar Barca, who supposedly named it Cartago Vetus. Whatever its ancient origins, the town's documented medieval history begins in earnest in 1317, when its lands passed from the dissolved Knights Templar to the Order of St John of Jerusalem. Wool trading and livestock farming brought prosperity, and several of the town's most important surviving buildings date from this period of growth, including the Loreto hermitage and the Hospital de San Roque. Cantavieja became a municipality in 1834.

The town played an outsized role in the nineteenth-century Carlist Wars. It served repeatedly as a Carlist headquarters, and at various points housed a printing press, a gunpowder factory, and a military tailor's workshop. A Carlist newspaper was even published here. The pretender Carlos María Isidro de Borbón visited in 1837 and was received with full honours. After a government siege, the town fell in May 1840, ending the First Carlist War. It then became a Carlist stronghold again in the Third Carlist War, this time described as the "Carlist metropolis of the centre." The final siege, in 1875, ended with the entire garrison taken prisoner — bringing that last war to a close.

Cantavieja's old town has been a protected historic-artistic ensemble since 1981, and in 2014 it was accepted into the association of Spain's most beautiful villages. The heart of it is the porticoed Plaza de Cristo Rey, where the parish church and the town hall face each other.

The parish church of the Asunción is a large baroque structure in three naves, the central one covered by a barrel vault. Its tower, which the main street passes beneath, has two octagonal upper sections with a pyramidal crown. The church was expanded between 1730 and 1745 onto an earlier medieval building, from which the tower and a side doorway survive. The Gothic church of San Miguel, built in the Levantine style, has a single pointed-vaulted nave and a five-sided apse with mason's marks still visible inside. It contains a notable alabaster tomb from 1415.

The castle ruins to the north of town are modest — the Carlist Wars took a heavy toll — but stretches of the outer masonry walls remain, along with a circular tower built on a medieval rectangular base. The town hall is a handsome masonry building with the town coat of arms on its façade and a fine wooden coffered ceiling inside. The nearby Museum of the Carlist Wars, on Calle Mayor, traces the impact of those conflicts across the Maestrazgo.