(2'5 Km - 1h 30 min)
Click aquí para la versión en españolIt explains the historical curiosities of each corner, so the visitor can imagine what it was in past times.
Includes a tourist map with the track and most interesting spots.
(Optimized for print & go. Includes map.)
Google map: View map in Google Maps, or view map in Google Earth
Arrival and parking
By bus: Regular lines stop at Aragon square’s bus
station
By car: Arriving via motorway or the N-240 road, take the
“Barbastro-centre” exit. The best option is to park close to the exit, at a
free parking area which is close to the graveyard, in front of the tourist
office.
The tour begins
at the old San Julian & Santa Lucia
hospital (today’s wine museum and tourist office). Here you can pick up
maps and other information about many of the places to visit in the Somontano
region, for example, the many wine cellars around Barbastro or the incredible
town of Alquezar.
Entering Barbastro
We will enter
the city through the ancient San Juan gate,
as the travellers from Zaragoza used to do centuries ago. This gate belonged to
Barbastro’s fourth exterior wall.
This wall was built in the 17th century, and according to historical
documents, it was the weakest of all the walls surrounding Barbastro and had a
lot of towers. Today this gate stands as a reminder of the original one that was
used to support the hospital floors.
As we pass
under the gate, we find on the left the bullfighting
ring, with its tiny museum. There’s only one bullfight a year (in
September), but it is also used for concerts during the Somontano music
festival in August.
Walking
down the steep street outside the bullfighting ring, you will realize why
Barbastro is known as “the small ravine”. It ends at Aragon square, known as “los Jardinetes” (the “small garden”) and the
Coso avenue.
We will
take a stroll along the Coso avenue later on, but for now let’s take a look at
the north side of the square. It makes up the second wall of Barbastro built in 918 by the Muslims to protect the
early city of Barbastro, which today is the Entremuro district.
Nowadays the
wall is hidden behind the buildings, but its ‘look’ still remains.
The street continues next to the bus
station and it does not offer any entrances, apart from “las escaleretas” (“the
small steps”), a small flight of steps that was opened in the 17th
century. Inside these buildings there are the remains of at least three defensive
towers.
The wall surrounded the city
by the street next to the bus station, and it continued up the north side of
the Coso Avenue. Buildings on the north side of Coso Avenue are still leaning
against the ancient wall.In front of us, there is the cathedral. To arrive at its gate inside the wall, we should have crossed the “Abbot Ducha” gate, southbound entry to Barbastro.
Cathedral
During Muslim
rule, there were eight mosques in Barbastro, and the Cathedral was the greatest
of them all. This seems like a big number of Mosques, but this only serves to
highlight how important the city was back then.
Before
entering the cathedral, take a look at the base of the right side of the
entrance: it’s made of large stone blocks, very different from the cathedral
brickwork. This was one of the ancient defensive towers of Barbastro’s wall. In
the 18th century, neighbors of the Entremuro district asked for
permission to use the tower ruins to build a chapel for their beloved Santo
Cristo de los Milagros (saint Christ of the Miracles).
You can
visit the cathedral by yourself or
you can arrange a guided tour at the museum that is next to the bishop’s
palace. You can use the door at the left side of the shrine to arrive there
without going around the cathedral.
The
cathedral is magnificent and it would take up too much space to write about it
in full in this brief guide , but it’s interesting to note that, on its north
side, behind the organ, there is a strange arrangement of chapels. This is due
to the fact that centuries ago there was a cloister and half of it was
transformed to chapels inside the cathedral and the other half was left outside
and later destroyed.
The bishop’s palace was built in the 17th
century and restored in the early 21th. Before that, bishops lived
in a house built upon a cliff over the river, next to an ancient church that no
longer exists. Today, this palace hosts not only the bishop and his office, but
a museum of sacred objects.
The lower part
is thicker, and the upper narrower. If you take a closer look, you will realize
that it is actually a tower inside of another tower
This is
because the original narrow Muslim minaret remains inside the Christian hexagonal
tower.
In 1366,
the French warlord Bertrand du Guesclin, famous for fighting side-by-side with
Joan of Arc, led his troops to fight for the Spanish king Pedro IV. He passed through
Barbastro and plundered the city. 306 people tried to take refuge inside the
tower with their belongings, but the soldiers set fire to the tower and they
were all killed. The original tower was heavily damaged due to this and the
inside tower remains scorched until today. In 1610, the outer hexagonal tower
was built, also adding a spire to the old tower.
Throughout its
history, the tower has been a Muslim minaret, a Christian tower, the home of
the bell-ringer (he had to stay at the tower at all times), a jail in the 17th
century, hideout of a secret society (the “Commoner Knights”) in 1824 and an
air defense gun emplacement during the Spanish civil war. Even nowadays, the
old air raid alarm sounds at noon.
A stroll along Entremuro, the old district of Barbastro (Optional)
Once the cathedral
has been visited, you can continue into the city center, but it is also worth
visiting the old Entremuro district. It’s a circular track starting and ending
at the cathedral tower. It takes about half an hour to complete it.
This
district was once the early city of Barbastro, and today remains like a
“village inside a city”, peaceful and quiet.
We enter through
the narrow and dark Hornos street.
At the beginning, on the right-hand side, there is an ancient masonry wall,
built with alternating lines of bricks and stones. This way of building was
used to save money. Neighbors call it the “roman wall”.
This wall
supports a tiny domestic orchard. It’s one of the Entremuro’s “Cármenes”, word
that comes from the Arab word “Karm” that means “vineyard”, “garden” or
“orchard”. Almost every house of this district has a small orchard at the back,
following the traditional Muslim city design. In the Spanish city of Granada,
the Muslim “Albaicin” district also follows this pattern.
A few
meters ahead, at the first crossroads, you can peek to your left to see some
more back gardens.
The
neighbors of this district were traditionally farmers, and back in the 80’s
there were still donkeys, mules, horses and other animals kept in the lower floors
of the houses. Along with the orchard, they were a way of life.
We arrive next
at the Candelaria Square. This pleasant
square has a great historical background, because It was here that the princess
Petronila, only daughter of king Ramiro II of Aragon, married the count of
Barcelona, joining Catalonia under the Aragonese crown. Their son Alfonso II would
govern a kingdom which included Aragon, Catalonia, Valencia, the Balearic
Islands, Sicily, Naples and Athens.
One of the
buildings has an old papal coat of arms carved in stone. This house was
reserved for the Pope’s representatives when the king of Aragon held his
meetings in Barbastro.
Now it’s
time to climb some stairs. At the north side of the square a staircase leads us
up to the “Barbacana”, the hill that
dominates Barbastro.
In this hill,
nowadays empty, once stood the castle of Barbastro, the first wall of the city. It was built in 811 by Jalaf ibn Rasid ibn
Asad.
There’s
nothing left of the castle today, but it probably stood on the west side of the
hill, where the convent of the Capuchinas sister is located today.
This
convent has very large stone blocks on its outer walls, and some parts of it
seem to have been built upon the ruins of a tower.
It had
three wells, one of them is still in use.
Walking
eastbound, we admire a magnificent view of the Pyrenees mountains from this
hill. Before going back to the narrow streets, we could take a little stroll
and arrive to “la peñeta”, a cliff
hanging over the Vero river. It’s a nice place to take pictures of the river
Vero entering Barbastro.
The church
of the “Santo Sepulcro” once stood here, but the poor quality of the rock and
the action of water eroded the cliff over the centuries and the church was
destroyed.
In the
opposite direction, a track leads us down to the “San Juan” district, where we
will find the “ice well”. In the
past, ice was collected in winter and held in a dark cave to use it in summer
time. Today, visitors can enter the well and there are lights and explanations
about it.
Returning
to the cathedral tower, we will walk down the narrow streets of Esperanza and
la Peña. At the corner between the streets stood the synagogue of Barbastro. After being forced to convert by the king,
the Jewish community of Barbastro had to turn the synagogue into a shrine,
named “San Salvador”. But they secretly kept their rituals, and worshiped
sacred Jewish objects that were hidden in the shrine. Until a few years ago, a
stone arch that belonged to the synagogue was still visible, half hidden by the
debris of buildings that were built in its place.
The stroll
ends next to the cathedral tower, and the visit will continue with the city
centre.
City centre
Once the
oldest part of Barbastro has been visited, the part that was inside the second
wall, we can continue onwards to the economic and social centre of the cty.
This part was
inside the third wall of Barbastro,
built by the king Juan I at the end of the 14th century. This wall
was connected to the second wall. It also covered the right side of the Vero
river and finished at the Coso Avenue.
Until the
building of the third wall, the place in which we stand was the east limit of
the city, and there was a gate called Ferrata,
between the bishop’s palace and the “Hermanitas” home for the elderly. When the
third wall was completed, this gate communicated the old city and the new city
and was named the “Traviesa” gate.
Before
walking down to Argensola street, we’ll take a look at the tiny square behind
the bishop’s palace: we can still see a good piece of the second wall and some
kind of gate. This way it’s easy to imagine where the second wall was.
The street we
are on was named “Rollo”. A “Rollo” was a column where criminals were tied to and
whipped as punishment. This place is where public punishments were enforced in
the middle ages.
The city hall square is formed by three
buildings: the “Hermanitas” home for the elderly is on the left. The city hall
stands in the front. The original building had a pigeon house and was built in
1510 by the moor Farag de Galí. On the right, there’s the “Escolapios”, the first
public school built in Spain by San Jose de Calasanz.
As we go
down Argensola street, we pass between the two buildings of the UNED (National
Distance Education University) and turn left to cross the Portillo bridge over the Vero river. This entry to Barbastro
was protected by a defensive gate, lost nowadays.
It is
recommended to walk the side of the river opposite to the buildings, so you can
look at the colored facades. Before the Vero river was canalized with concrete
to avoid the dramatic floods, these buildings stood vertically over the water. ‘1984’
writer George Orwell was impressed by this fact when he visited Barbastro
during the war.
There was also
a waterfall and an irrigation ditch that passed under the buildings on its way
to many watermills.
There is an
old windmill turned into a museum named “el Moliné”, and two fountains named Azud and Vivero, today restored after
lying half a century underground. This street is called “las Fuentes” (Fountain
street).
A little
farther there is the San Francisco
church and a fountain with the same name almost under the bridge. In the past,
this church was a convent, and at this side stood another gate of the city,
named the “Yedra” gate. There were also some Arab baths with decorated
fountains.
We’ll go to
the centre again crossing any of the two bridges close to San Francisco church.
If we lived in the past, to enter the city we would have to go through another gate:
the San Francisco gate, which was
demolished in 1936.
As we
walk along Argensola street we pass a large house turned into a library: it is
the Argensola house. It has nice
wooden eaves, and belonged to the brothers Lupercio and Bartolomé Leonardo de
Argensola, poets and historians
Shortly
after, we come across the arch of an impressive brickwork house. It’s the
birthplace of Jose Maria Escrivá de Balaguer, founder of Opus Dei. The original
house was demolished and rebuilt by the Opus Dei.
We arrive at
the pedestrian Mercado square (Market
Square), always full of playing children. There is a market every morning
where fresh vegetables grown in amateur Somontano orchards are sold since many
centuries ago.
We cross
the square and turn right to Romero street. There’s a narrow street that
crosses on the left: there used to be another entry to the city from the south:
the Cremada gate. We continue walking
straight to San Ramon street, full of different shops. The wall of the city
continued at the side of this street and joined the second wall in the Coso Avenue,
where the street ends.
Coso Avenue was originally left outside of the city until
the fourth wall was built to protect the new districts and orchards that grew on
the south side of the city. Nowadays, Coso Avenue is a pleasant wooded street
where the social life of Barbastro takes place. This fact is specially evident on
summer nights, when everyone sits to eat and drink on the terrace.
Eating & drinking in Barbastro
It is easy
to to have a nice and cheap lunch or dinner anywhere in Barbastro.
Both Coso Avenue
or Mercado square offer a lot of suitable places for different budgets:
Sandwiches, tapas, daily menus…
There are
many other good options in the city, among them I would recommend:
From 10€ to 15€
El rincón
Amazing quality and price. Delicious daily menu. It’s better to book in
Amazing quality and price. Delicious daily menu. It’s better to book in
Mesón del muro
A good and affordable daily menu, also served on the weekends.
A good and affordable daily menu, also served on the weekends.
Hotel “Mi casa”
A cheap, homemade and tasty menu at the hotel restaurant.
A cheap, homemade and tasty menu at the hotel restaurant.
Around 20€ and up
Trasiego
Delicious tapas and dished at a reasonable price.
Modern but cozy.
Ordesa
Nice food in really large amounts. Do not miss their grilled meat
Nice food in really large amounts. Do not miss their grilled meat
Bodega del Vero
Maybe the most expensive option, but it’s hard to match its quality anywhere. The decoration and atmosphere is magnificent.
Maybe the most expensive option, but it’s hard to match its quality anywhere. The decoration and atmosphere is magnificent.
Shopping
Barbastro has
always based its economy on trade, because it is well connected with the Pyrenees
valleys. The typical products are, apart from the Somontano wine, the
“chiretas” (lamb stomach filled with spiced rice and meat, similar to the
Scottish Haggis) and the sweets: “crespillos”, “pastillo” and “Biarritz” cakes.
If you don’t dare to taste “chiretas” (even though they taste better than they sound),
you could go for the “pastillo”, but if you need to take it away inside your
bag then maybe the “Biarritz” cakes are easier to carry.
Or “Story of Entremuro district”, that’s the web version of a book about the old city history. It contains a digital map with the walls, gates and temples in the chapter "Castle and walls of the ancient Barbastro (spanish)".
Barbastro en el recuerdo - Flickr
Old photos of Barbastro shared by the locals.
Barbastro revive el pasado - Facebook
Users group sharing their photos and memories of Barbastro.
Knowing more...
Historia del EntremuroOr “Story of Entremuro district”, that’s the web version of a book about the old city history. It contains a digital map with the walls, gates and temples in the chapter "Castle and walls of the ancient Barbastro (spanish)".
Barbastro en el recuerdo - Flickr
Old photos of Barbastro shared by the locals.
Barbastro revive el pasado - Facebook
Users group sharing their photos and memories of Barbastro.
Translated by Sergio Fernan
