Teruel

Teruel exists — the famous protest slogan of Spain's emptiest provincial capital became a national byword, and the town it defends repays attention extravagantly. Teruel is the capital of Mudéjar: the brick-and-ceramic towers of El Salvador and San Martín, green-and-white glazed geometry climbing over the old town, crown the UNESCO-listed Aragonese Mudéjar ensemble — Islamic craft in Christian service, nowhere finer — and the cathedral's painted ceiling, a fourteenth-century picture book of medieval life, is called the Sistine of the style. Beneath one church lie the town's sovereign dead: the Lovers of Teruel, Isabel and Diego, the thirteenth-century pair whose deaths of thwarted love — verified by the mummies displayed beside each other, hands almost touching in Juan de Ávalos's alabaster — give Spain its Romeo and Juliet, celebrated each February when the whole town dresses medieval for the Bodas de Isabel.

The province adds dinosaurs (Dinópolis curates Spain's richest fossil beds), the jamón of Teruel's own denomination drying in mountain air, and the silent sierras that made the slogan necessary. The concert record's register — bands, choirs, church music, touring visits — sounds beneath the glazed towers. Love with evidence, brick raised to jewellery: Teruel exists, emphatically.