Caspe

Long before Rome, the Caspe area supported several settlements. At Cabezo de Monleón, above the Guadalope river, archaeologists have identified 52 houses arranged along a central street, home to an estimated 300 people — shepherds, metalworkers and cereal farmers. Later Iberian sites include Loma de los Brunos and La Tallada, a hilltop village of rectangular houses partly cut into the rock. Local sources also record the pre-Roman city of Trabia, which minted its own coins before being destroyed by Rome.

Muslim forces arrived in 713, and Caspe remained part of the Upper March of al-Andalus for around four centuries. In 1169, King Alfonso II of Aragon retook the town, by then a population of over a thousand, almost entirely Muslim. Residents were allowed to keep their faith but had one year to leave their homes and move outside the walls.

In 1392, Juan Fernández de Heredia, Grand Master of the Knights of St John, bought out the Sesé family's holdings to found a convent, raised the church to collegiate status, and endowed it with relics including a fragment of the True Cross. He was buried there on his death.

Medieval Caspe was also Aragon's leading centre of glassmaking — and one of Spain's most important. Around thirty glass furnaces have been documented in the area. The local salt-rich soils encouraged the growth of barilla, and the quality of local sand provided the other key raw material. Jewish families appear to have pioneered the industry, and glassmaking dynasties became some of the most prominent in town.

The oldest surviving monument is the rock-art shelter of Plano del Pulido, designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1998. From the Roman period, the Mausoleum of Miralpeix — a rectangular chamber with a barrel vault framed by Corinthian pilasters — was declared a national monument in 1931.

The dominant building in town is the Collegiate Church of Santa María la Mayor del Pilar, considered one of the finest examples of purist Gothic architecture in Aragon, with Cistercian influence still visible. Its three naves are covered by ribbed vaulting, the central nave the tallest and widest. Pope Adrian VI consecrated it in 1522. In 1412, the mass proclaiming the verdict of the Compromise of Caspe was celebrated here. The church was declared a national monument in 1931, though its Gothic altarpieces and two major Gothic tombs — including that of Grand Master Heredia — were destroyed in 1936. Inside today, the church keeps the Vera Cruz de Caspe, one of the largest known fragments of the cross on which Christ died.

The castle of the Compromise, originally built by the Knights of St John and used jointly as castle and convent alongside the church, was badly damaged during the Napoleonic Wars and the Carlist Wars. Today little remains beyond a section of battlemented wall with decorated voussoirs and the basement vaults. Outside town, the Torre de Salamanca rises on a hill and offers a wide view over Caspe and the Ebro valley.

Several ermitas survive in the streets: Santa Quiteria (1648), the Magdalena (1790), Balma (1843), and the baroque San Indalecio in the old La Muela quarter, with a square plan topped by a hemispherical dome. The convent of San Agustín, completed in 1623, survives with its cloister largely intact. The convent of Santo Domingo, facing the railway station, is a ruined shell — used at various points as a military hospital, cemetery, prison and fortress, and finally abandoned in 1978.