Uncastillo

Uncastillo sits close to the Roman site of Los Bañales, but its own story begins in the early medieval period when the Pamplonan king Sancho Garcés built a fortress on the great rock of Peña Ayllón, at the point where the rivers Cadenas and Riguel meet. Its purpose was military: to block Muslim forces based at Sádaba from pushing deeper into the Kingdom of Aragón through the Sierra de Santo Domingo. The town became a key frontier post during the Christian reconquest.

As Aragonese kings pushed the frontier southward, Uncastillo flourished. The twelfth century brought a period of prosperity that produced six Romanesque churches and a largely intact urban fabric that still survives. A second peak came in the sixteenth century, when the town hall was built and, in 1543, the Estatuto de Artes de Uncastillo was founded, an institution that rivalled the University of Huesca in importance.

The twentieth century brought violence. During the October Revolution of 1934, a clash between striking labourers and Civil Guards left several people dead. When the Spanish Civil War began, reprisals followed: Falangist and Carlist groups entered the town alongside Civil Guards, arrested members of left-wing organisations and their families on the basis of seized documents, rumour, or personal denunciations, and carried out killings.

Uncastillo's most striking feature is how much of its medieval fabric has survived. The street plan and rural architecture of the Cinco Villas region are well represented here.

The town has six Romanesque churches. San Martín is now a Romanesque art interpretation centre; its single nave, pointed barrel vault, semicircular apse, and austere cloister date from the twelfth century, with later additions. Notably, the portal of San Miguel — declared a national monument in 1931 — was sold in 1915 to the Museum of Boston. San Felices, by the river Cadenas, has a main portal attributed to the so-called Master of San Juan de la Peña. San Juan, on a promontory nearby, retains well-preserved medieval paintings inside. Santa María and San Andrés — the latter built at the initiative of Bishop Pedro del Frago y Garcés, a native of Uncastillo — complete the six.

The castle occupies Peña Ayllón at the centre of town. The Palace of Pedro IV, commissioned in the fourteenth century and built by Blasco Aznárez de Borau — the same architect who worked on Zaragoza's Aljafería — is considered one of the finest examples of Gothic architecture in Aragón. The town also has a former Jewish quarter, a recently restored ice well near the road to Sos, and the Roman ruins of Los Bañales on the edge of the municipal area, including surviving pillars of an aqueduct that once carried water from the Arba river.