Zaragoza

I went to Zaragoza expecting a stopover between Madrid and Barcelona and stayed two extra days, which tells you most of what you need to know. The city sits on the Ebro, Spain’s largest river by volume, and the first thing that hits you crossing the Puente de Piedra is the skyline on the far bank: the Basílica del Pilar, its four corner towers and central dome covered in glazed tiles of purple, green, and gold, spread out along the riverfront like something too large for the town around it. It practically is — this is one of the largest churches in Spain, built around a pillar that, according to tradition, the Virgin Mary descended on in the flesh to appear before the apostle James, making Zaragoza one of the oldest Marian pilgrimage sites in Christianity, predating most of the cathedrals built to compete with it.

Caesaraugusta, Layer by Layer

What surprised me most was how much older the city is than that basilica suggests. Zaragoza was founded by the Romans as Caesaraugusta — its name is a direct corruption of that — and the old town still sits over a preserved Roman forum, theatre, river port, and public baths, all excavated and viewable in a scattered set of small museums that let you walk down into the actual street level of the first-century city. Then came the Moors, who held the city for over three centuries and left behind the Aljafería, a fortified Islamic palace on the western edge of the old town that is, remarkably, still in active use today as the seat of the regional parliament of Aragón. Its horseshoe arches and carved stucco courtyards are some of the finest surviving Islamic architecture in Spain outside Andalusia, a fact that gets far less attention than it should.

Tapas Streets and a City That Feeds Itself Well

None of this history felt like a museum exercise, though, because Zaragoza is also just a very good city to eat and drink in. El Tubo, a tangle of narrow streets behind the Plaza del Pilar, is where locals go for tapas crawls, and I spent one long evening moving bar to bar with a group of Aragonese friends of a friend, eating small plates of ternasco — the region’s milk-fed lamb — and ham off the bone, nobody in a hurry to sit down anywhere. Zaragoza also gave the world its own festival, Las Fiestas del Pilar in October, when the entire city turns out to build a mountain of flowers at the base of the basilica as an offering to the Virgin, a tradition that’s oddly moving even watched as an outsider, thousands of people quietly walking up with bouquets for hours.

The Ebro itself is worth a slow walk too — wide, brown-green, unglamorous in the way big working rivers usually are, but the Puente de Piedra, rebuilt many times since its medieval origins, still frames the basilica in exactly the way every postcard of this city relies on, and for once the postcard undersells it.

When to go: Early October coincides with Fiestas del Pilar and the best atmosphere in the city, though it’s crowded; April, May, and late September offer mild weather for walking the old town without the festival crush.