La Iglesuela del Cid

The settlement is ancient, known long before the Carthaginians arrived under the name Athea, and it passed through several names before taking its current form in 1464. The "del Cid" addition came later, from the tradition that El Cid ordered the town fortified and its castle built; after his death in 1099, the surrounding highlands fell to the Almoravids.

During the Reconquista, the town came under the Templars as part of the Bailía de Cantavieja. A royal charter granted in 1242 consolidated the settlement, and the first walled enclosure dates from this period. When the Temple was dissolved, La Iglesuela passed to the Order of St John, which built a hospital to shelter the sick, wounded, and travellers passing through. The Torre de los Nublos also dates from this era.

The town's peak appears to have been the 16th and 17th centuries, when major buildings went up and the parish church was rebuilt and enlarged. New neighbourhoods grew outside the walls, and sections of the walls were eventually demolished to make way for expansion.

In the 19th century the Maestrazgo became a key theatre of the Carlist Wars. The Carlist pretender Carlos María Isidro de Borbón entered La Iglesuela on 23 July 1837 and stayed until 30 July, when the approach of the Liberal general Oraá forced his departure. In May 1840 the Duke of Ahumada took the town after a brief skirmish, using it as a base before pressing on toward Morella. A cholera epidemic struck in 1885. The early 20th century brought the Convento de los Paules and the road connecting the town to Cantavieja and Mosqueruela. The Civil War caused significant losses to the town's heritage, and the hardship of the postwar years led to further demolitions.

The old town was declared a protected cultural asset in 1982 for its concentration of medieval civil and religious architecture. The parish church is a layered building: the vaulted nave and polygonal apse survive from an earlier Gothic structure, while the baroque chancel was added at the opposite end, inverting the original orientation. A broad brick dome on pendentives covers the crossing, and a plateresque doorway in a semicircular arch with attached columns completes the exterior. The square stone tower rises in three stages, the top one octagonal. Several chapels were funded by wealthy local families, among them the Aliaga and Matutano.

The Torreón de los Nublos and the town hall now form a single block adjoined to the church. The tower, built in rubble and ashlar, is crowned with battlements and retains its original ribbed vaults across three internal floors. The town hall, probably dating from the late 15th or early 16th century, has a sober façade with three pointed arches and two Gothic twin-light windows; its council chamber has a notably austere ceiling.

The Portal de San Pablo is a surviving arc of the old town wall, still fitted with the original door-hinge sockets. Its inner face carries a plastered upper section with a niche framing an image of the Apostle, dated by an inscription to 1721.

The Ermita de la Virgen del Cid stands on a rocky escarpment that was once an Iberian settlement; Iberian funerary slabs were reused in its walls and are still visible from outside. Built in 1546 and later renovated, it houses a medieval carved image of the Virgin, with a copy kept in the parish church. Tradition holds that El Cid visited the site. An adjacent hospice with an oven, a hermit's house, and several rooms once accommodated pilgrims and visiting delegations.

The Ermita de Loreto, built in 1685 in lime-washed rubble and ashlar, has a single nave, a colonnaded atrium, and a groin vault. The small Ermita de San Roque stands nearby. Both sit within a trapezoidal walled Calvary containing two rows of stone crosses marking the fourteen Stations of the Cross.