Jaca
"Jaca held the mountains before it held a name — everyone from Charlemagne's army to a French pilgrim route had to go through it first."
The old capital of Aragón guards a Pyrenean crossroads with a starfish-shaped citadel and a Romanesque cathedral that Camino pilgrims have been passing through for a thousand years.
You feel Jaca before you see it, in the way the road out of Huesca starts climbing and the air turns thin and mineral, pine forest giving way to grey Pyrenean peaks that stay snow-capped well into June. This is a garrison town, and it looks like one — not in a grim way, but in the sense that everything about its layout still answers to strategy. Jaca sits at the mouth of the Canfranc valley, the historic gateway between Aragón and France, and for over a thousand years whoever controlled this pass controlled the door to the peninsula.
A Star Built for War That Never Quite Came
The Ciudadela de Jaca is the reason I’d come, really — a five-pointed star fortress commissioned by Felipe II in the 1590s, one of the best-preserved Renaissance military fortifications in Europe, still moated and still garrisoned in part today. Walking its perimeter, you notice how deliberately over-engineered it feels: bastions angled so no attacker could approach without being caught in crossfire from two directions at once, a design descended from Italian trace italienne principles. And yet the fortress barely saw real combat. It was built as deterrence against a French invasion that mostly stayed hypothetical, which gives the whole place a strange, unused solemnity — like a suit of armor kept polished for a duel that got called off.
Inside the moat, deer graze on the grass banks, which felt almost too on-the-nose as a metaphor for militarism gone quiet. I walked the ramparts near dusk with the peaks turning pink behind the star points and thought about how much of Spanish history is written in fortifications like this — built out of fear, then slowly absorbed back into ordinary town life.
Pilgrims, Bells, and the Road Toward Somport
Jaca’s cathedral, consecrated in the eleventh century, is one of the earliest and most influential Romanesque buildings in Spain — its carved capitals and checkerboard ajedrezado jaqués frieze pattern were copied across churches all along the Camino de Santiago’s Aragonese route. This is the path pilgrims take who cross into Spain through the Somport pass rather than the more famous French route further west, and Jaca has functioned as their first real town, their first hot meal and hostel bed, for centuries. I sat in the Plaza de la Catedral one evening and watched a small group of pilgrims arrive with the particular slow, deliberate walk of people who’d been on their feet since dawn — trekking poles clicking against the cobblestones, shell badges swinging from their packs.
Later I ate migas — fried breadcrumbs with garlic, chorizo, and grapes, a shepherd’s dish born of Pyrenean scarcity — at a bar near the old market, and the waiter told me, without much prompting, that half the town’s economy still runs on skiers heading up to Astún and Candanchú in winter and pilgrims and hikers the rest of the year. Jaca, it turns out, has always made its living from people just passing through.
When to go: July and August bring the coolest relief from the Spanish summer heat found anywhere in the lowlands, thanks to the altitude; September offers the same clear mountain light with far fewer visitors.