Maluenda

People were living on the hill behind Maluenda's castle as far back as the Bronze Age. Quern stones, flint tools, and pottery from that period are now in the archaeological museum in Calatayud. More dramatically, a hoard of Iberian silver coins mixed with Roman Republican denarii, buried between around 90 and 79 BC, points to the upheaval of the Sertorian War fought across this territory.

A Roman bridge once crossed the Jiloca here, and the town's importance persisted into the medieval period. Alfonso I of Aragon took Maluenda from Muslim hands in 1120. In 1255 it may have been the secret meeting place of James I of Aragon and Henry of Castile, an encounter later recorded in a chronicle by the Infante Don Juan Manuel. During the 14th-century War of the Two Peters, Maluenda played a defensive role along the Jiloca corridor, though Castilian forces seized the castle in 1363.

The town also sits on a Camino de Santiago route running from the Port of Sagunto to Burgos, identified and waymarked by researcher Luis Bona as an alternative pilgrimage path from Valencia.

Maluenda's castle is one of the rare surviving examples of an authentically Muslim rammed-earth fortress in Spain. The Chanson de Roland names its keeper at the time of Charlemagne's march on Zaragoza, suggesting it was among the earliest Muslim strongholds in al-Andalus. The ruins sit on a bare, elongated ridge above the town. Its longest axis ran about 80 metres, with two large rectangular towers on the west side and a partially preserved walled enclosure facing the village.

The parish church is mudéjar in style, built in brick, rammed earth, and plaster, with a single nave and a seven-sided apse. Its Gothic doorway was added later.

The church of Saints Justa and Rufina, completed in 1413 and declared a Historic-Artistic Monument in 1931, shares the same single-nave, seven-sided apse form. One exterior facade has a pointed arch doorway with two archivolt rings and four pointed brick windows above. Inside, Islamic ataurique decoration survives in one remaining window grille. The altarpiece paintings were commissioned in 1475 from Domingo Ram and Juan Rius, who worked on them until 1477.

The church of San Miguel, now ruinous, was built in mudéjar style over a former mosque, using plaster mortar with little ornament. The Carmelite convent dates from 1648 and includes a baroque church with a Latin cross plan.

The watchtower known locally as El Palomar stands about 20 metres tall on a small gypsum rise, with a gallery of arches at its top and a cave beneath it connected to the tower by a trapdoor. El Arco, a medieval gate arch, was once part of the town's defences.