For a city like this to reach to the point to have to issue a slogan saying “Teruel exists” it clearly indicates that it has not been treated with justice. For being too far of any lines of communication or for whatever reason, the small and beautiful Teruel has been, and is, little known despite having been here a handful of centuries and having a set of Mudejar towers unique in the world.
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For a city like this to reach to the point to have to issue a slogan saying “Teruel exists” it clearly indicates that it has not been treated with justice. For being too far of any lines of communication or for whatever reason, the small and beautiful Teruel has been, and is, little known despite having been here a handful of centuries and having a set of Mudejar towers unique in the world.
And it could have many more ancient things if there had been something left from the Turboleti, a Celtic-Iberian town that lived in this area in the third century BC. It seems that they were quite fond of wars so one day they decided to go and destroy Sagunto with their Carthaginian allies. But the Romans arrived with that military efficiency that made them owners of the Mediterranean and erased from the map the Celtic-Iberian population of Turboleti.
So we must wait for the arrival of other visitors of importance, in the eighth century, to get back to Teruel’s history. These visitors came from the South, and they talked about Allah and Muhammad non-stop. They called the settlement Tirwal, which was more of a military and defensive place, and they stayed there until the arrival of the corresponding Christian King and his correspondent desire to conquer. In this case, it was Alfonso II, who defeated the Muslims in 1171 and decided to found, or refund, a village in the area.
It is just at that moment when the myth of Teruel appeared, enough already of historical facts. And it says that to indicate the exact place in where to build the city, a bull appeared under a star or some sort of mixture of a bull and a star; because both things, in any case, became symbols of the city.
The Mudejar towers that we talked about at the beginning, and that were built in that Christian Teruel, were also going to be a symbol of the city. You will find the first one in the Cathedral of Santa María and the second one in the Church of San Pedro. Then, once your eyes get used to it, you can go and admire the majestic tower of San Salvador and its twin in San Martin, both involved in legends as they should be.
But for a legend, of course, the one of the Lovers of Teruel. You can go through their mausoleum and learn the story of Isabel and Diego, which starts with the young man going to find fortune to the war and she promising to wait for him. We will not tell you the end, but we will give you a clue: it is not a good end!
