Rubielos de Mora

Roman coins and an inscribed stone tablet, recorded by the historian Pascual Madoz in 1845, point to ancient settlement here long before the medieval town took shape. The substantial manor houses that still line the streets reflect the landowning class that once dominated local life.

More recent history left harder marks. In September 1835, the Carlist general Cabrera fought his way into Rubielos and killed 72 of its defenders. During the Civil War the valley floor held a Republican airfield, with the hermitage of Saints Abdón and Senén converted into a command centre — meeting room, radio room, infirmary and all. The airfield fell to Franco's forces in the spring of 1938. Weeks earlier, in January 1938, a mutiny by soldiers of the 84th Mixed Brigade — men who had fought hard at Teruel and refused to return after a rest — ended with 46 of them shot for insubordination. After the war, guerrilla fighters of the AGLA remained active in the area into 1947, twice blowing sections of the local railway line and briefly occupying the town to distribute propaganda.

In 1980 Rubielos was declared a historic-artistic ensemble. It received the Europa Nostra award in 1983, joined the association of Spain's Most Beautiful Villages in 2013, and was voted Spain's finest village on the television programme *Luce tu pueblo* in December 2016.

The parish church of Santa María la Mayor is a baroque building in stone and rubblework, with a single nave, ribbed vaulted side chapels, and a main doorway on the Gospel side framed by a covered porch with a semicircular arch. Its tower rises through three square stages to an octagonal belfry; one of the bells dates from 1476.

Several hermitages survive around the town. The oldest is probably that of Saints Abdón and Senén, dating to the thirteenth century and retaining a Gothic rose window. The hermitage of Santa Ana was built in the first half of the seventeenth century, with maintenance accounts surviving from 1659–62 and a substantial remodelling in 1888. The hermitage of El Pilar, formerly part of the Tonda-Serret house and later the Marquesses of Villasegura, has lunette vaulting and eighteenth-century stucco decoration, stripped out in 1936 and later replaced with painted canvases. The neoclassical Calvario hermitage, octagonal outside and circular within, looks out over the valley.

Two convents add further weight. The Augustinian convent's church was the town's original parish; the adjoining monastery of San Ignacio de Loyola was founded in 1624. The Discalced Carmelite convent, founded in 1608 and completed in 1622, is notable for its church and cloister, though it suffered structural damage during the Carlist wars of 1835.

Of the town's original seven gateways, two remain: the Portal de San Antonio, considered one of the finest gates in Aragón, and the Portal del Carmen, which incorporates a baroque chapel to the Virgin of Carmen. The Renaissance town hall and the old Lonja exchange building also stand in the old centre. Among the surviving noble houses, the Casa de los Condes de Florida is particularly striking: a three-storey ashlar facade with baroque doorways, ironwork grilles, a family shield, and a top-floor gallery of twelve arches under a decorated double timber cornice. The Palacio de los Marqueses de Villasegura is one of the largest palaces in Rubielos, built in the Aragonese Renaissance manner. The Casa de los Condes de Creixell, a baroque house whose facade bears the family coat of arms, served as General Cabrera's headquarters during the Carlist fighting.