Montalbán

Montalbán takes its name from the castle that once dominated the town from the left bank of the Río Martín. Its history is bound up with that castle and the commandery of the Order of Santiago established here.

The town appears in the Cantar del Mio Cid, and by 1158 it was mentioned in Christian documents when Pope Adrian IV confirmed the churches of the diocese of Zaragoza. Around 1160, Ramón Berenguer IV took the town from Muslim control. By 1189 it belonged to the lordship of Fernán Ruiz de Azagra, lord also of Calatayud and Tarazona. King Pedro II granted the town its own charter in 1208, ratified by Jaime I in 1225. From 1241 the castle contained a monastery subject to the prior of Uclés, and it may also have sheltered Templar knights fleeing persecution under Jaime II.

The castle and monastery survived into the modern era but were destroyed in 1839 during the First Carlist War. Only foundations remain. A 1690 document records a riot in which townspeople clashed violently with the friars of the convent over rights to the local mills.

Montalbán was a walled town, and substantial sections of those fortifications survive. They were built in 1363 to defend against incursions from the Kingdom of Castile, and they include two gateways and a turreted arch.

The main gateway into the old quarter, the Portal de Daroca — also called the Torreón de la Cárcel in memory of its former use as a jail — stands on a ground-floor portico of good ashlar stonework and rises through three floors under a pitched roof. To the north, the Portal de la Muralla (also known as the Portal de la Rambla) gives a second entrance. A third, the Portal de Santa Engracia, is the only one that still retains its original doors; it faces east toward the Río Martín valley and was built during the War of the Two Peters.

The Church of Santiago, at one end of the Calle Mayor, mixes Gothic and Mudéjar styles. Its lower structure is cut stone; the upper sections are brick and ceramic. Inside, a single wide nave opens onto lateral chapels and a seven-sided apse. The tower is a church within a church — a main tower with a second internal tower serving as the staircase. The Mudéjar upper section of the church features a walkway that gives the building a distinctly military character, earning it listed status as a historic-artistic monument. Restoration work was carried out in 1956 by architect Fernando Chueca Goitia.

Beneath the church, a large medieval cellar houses the Interpretation Centre for Geology and Speleology of the Parque Cultural del Río Martín.

Of the castle itself, once high above the town near the church, only scattered wall sections remain on the hillside, along with the remnants of what may have been the keep and two lower square towers.

The old town also conceals an extensive network of underground cellars and passageways running beneath the historic centre. About 3 km out, in the Barranco de la Tejería, the remains of a former tile-making works survive, including its chimney.