Tarazona Spain: The Gateway to Garnacha

Tarazona from above, with the octagonal Plaza de Toros Vieja at center. Built between 1790 and 1792, the ring holds 32 dwellings around its courtyard — and people still live in them.   ©Dawn Damico

Destination Spain ┃Tarazona

From the Palacio Episcopal you see the entire town, one that is older than most things in Spain. Church bells ring in the distance, Moncayo mountain is capped with snow, a bullring stands empty except for the memories of past fights, and storks that have migrated from Africa tend their nests on chimneys and bell towers throughout the city.

Tarazona sits near the Queiles River, roughly 84 kilometers (about 52 miles) northwest of Zaragoza. At one time, it was the second-largest city in Aragón after Zaragoza, and today the population hovers around 11,000. It is the gateway to Campo de Borja, a natural stop on the way to its old-vine Garnacha and La Ruta de la Garnacha, the region’s wine trail.

The Romans called it Turiaso, and its people held full Roman citizenship. It was a crossroads of trade, diplomacy, and war for a thousand years. Christians, Jews, and Muslims lived here in separate quarters and the old town’s street plan still holds its medieval shape.

But there is more to this city than architecture and history. Like harlequins outrunning a shower of tomatoes.

The Casa Consistorial on the Plaza de España — the square where, every 27 August at noon, the Cipotegato steps out the door into a crowd armed with tomatoes. The building was originally the town’s lonja, or exchange house.    ©Dawn Damico

Why tomatoes? The reason is debated, but many long-time residents will just say it’s how it’s always been. Still, the fiestas of San Atilano always start the same way: The buildings are covered in plastic.

Every year on August 27 at the stroke of noon, a man (or woman) in a hooded harlequin costume walks out of the door of Tarazona’s town hall into the Plaza de España. The mission? Run through the streets, climb the statue, and tie a scarf to the top all while thousands of people throw tomatoes at him.

He is the Cipotegato. He runs through the streets using a route that only he knows — usually one that has some private meaning for him — protected by friends and former Cipotegatos who clear a path through the crowd. It’s chaotic and messy (which is why the buildings are protected by plastic). And, it’s a tradition that has been handed down, in one form or another, for generations.

Before the modern-day Cipotegato, Tarazona’s main festival was Corpus Christi. The problem was timing — Corpus Christi fell during harvest season and a week of ceremony wasn’t practical. In 1644 the city acquired a relic of its native son and patron saint, San Atilano, an 11th-century bishop of Zamora, and moved the principal festival from Corpus Christi to San Atilano. The new dates landed at the end of harvest, in late August. And just like that, the fiestas of San Atilano were born.

As for the tomatoes and the harlequin, the town has at least three stories to explain it.

The one you will hear most often is the prisoner. This version claims that each year at the patron’s festival a condemned man was offered his freedom if he could survive a stoning by the citizens and reach a chain at the edge of town. The stones became the tomatoes. It is a wonderful story, but Tarazona Monumental, the town’s heritage foundation, explicitly rejects it. It’s likely an urban legend.

The second story seems to originate from a 17th century reference to a figure appearing on the eve of Corpus Christi. This figure chased children and struck them with a stick tied to an inflated cat’s bladder…what!? The character is remembered as Cara de gato or Cabeza de gato, cat-face, cat-head. Archives from the 18th century show a resolution forbidding a character called El Pellejo de Gato — the cat skin — from going out to chase the children of the town. Perhaps these are one and the same, separated by centuries.

In a third story, the Cipotegato appears to be the last surviving figure of Tarazona’s dance, or paloteao — the Aragonese folk performance of music, stick-dance, and spoken verse. His role was simply to clear a path, going ahead of the procession and the dancers.

During my tour, the guides relayed two additional anecdotes surrounding the festivities. One suggested that throwing the tomatoes was a fun and spirited way for the community to express disagreement with the government, since the Cipotegato emerges from the municipal Town Hall. The other anecdote goes back to the harvest. Because the area outside served as the market, the children picked up whatever vegetable scraps were left over in the square to throw at the Cipotegato as he emerged from the building. Those scraps eventually turned into tomatoes.

Today, the town holds a lottery among more than a hundred people who apply for the honor. Their identity is kept secret until they walk back through the town hall door. In the whole history of the tradition, only four women have been chosen. No matter how it started, it’s clear that the festival has evolved over the centuries and today, it’s a way to bring the community together for a little messy fun. It is a Fiesta de Interés Turístico Nacional / Festival of National Tourist Interest.

Clarification from an Aragon Regional Tourism board representitive, updated 8/8/2026: San Atilano was born in Tarazona and was bishop of Zamora. The arrival of the San Atilano relic in Tarazona (the incorrupt arm) on August 28, 1644 is what caused the festival dates to change. San Atilano’s feast day was October 5.

The Casa Consistorial on the Plaza de España — the square where, every 27 August at noon, the Cipotegato steps out the door into a crowd armed with tomatoes. The building was originally the town’s lonja, or exchange house. ©Dawn Damico

What struck me most when we walked into the ring was how small it was. In fact, I thought our guide was taking us into a courtyard surrounded by historic residences, which she was, but I did not expect to hear that it was originally built as the city’s bullring.

To be fair, this was my first bullring. My frame of reference for Spanish bullfighting came directly from the big screen, Ernest Hemingway, and Walt Disney’s Ferdinand the Bull. The ring’s size, however, doesn’t make it any less important to the history and culture of Tarazona. Or as a study in real estate investing.

The story begins in 1789, when eight prominent Tarazona residents — landowners, stockmen, wine growers, and textile manufacturers — petitioned the town council for a piece of the Prado de la Virgen del Río, the public meadow by the river. Their proposal: give us the land for free, and we will build houses on it, arranged to enclose a courtyard that can serve as a ring for bullfights. Five of the eight held municipal office, so the request had a good chance of approval.

The town said yes, and construction on the octagonal structure began in 1790. Plaza Nueva, the New Square, opened in 1792 on the feast of San Atilano. The town got its bullring, and the owners got prime real estate for free. They built 32 dwellings around the courtyard with arches and balconies that faced the ring. On bullfight days the owners rented them out, recouping their investment, and kept the best first-floor balcony in each house for themselves.

Bullfights ran here until 1868. In 1870, a new and larger ring opened on the Avenida de Navarra, and the original was renamed Plaza de Toros Vieja, the old bullring. For decades the arches were bricked shut because the people living in the residences needed walls. After a full restoration in 1998, they were opened once again.

People still live in the flats. The courtyard has since held concerts, a medieval market, and even a bullfight, but only for a single day in 2006. A bit of nostalgia, I suppose.

A yellow arrow and a scallop shell on Calle Paco Martínez Soria, marking the Camino Castellano-Aragonés. The arrow is the invention of one Galician priest in 1984; the road it marks is a thousand years older.    ©Dawn Damico

There is a yellow arrow painted on the wall of Paco Martínez Soria, a street named after Tarazona’s most famous son. Below it, a scallop shell set into the stone steps. These are the marks of the Camino, something I was familiar with after watching the Emilio Estevez movie, The Way. I didn’t know Tarazona was part of that story. I also didn’t know that a priest with a can of cheap paint was the reason the arrows exist.

Tarazona is a stage town on the Camino Castellano-Aragonés, a 239-kilometer — roughly 149-mile — Jacobean route that leaves the Ebro Way at Gallur and runs west toward Soria before joining the Camino de la Lana at Santo Domingo de Silos. Its Aragonese stretch passes through Gallur, Mallén, Borja, El Buste, Tarazona, Torrellas, and Los Fayos. It is a real path, walked by real pilgrims, and goes straight through town.

The arrow was conceived in 1984 by Elías Valiña Sampedro, the parish priest of O Cebreiro in Galicia who had written his doctoral thesis on the Camino. He kept hearing the same complaint from the handful of pilgrims that walked it: we get lost.

To solve the problem, he bought some cheap yellow paint, loaded the cans into a Citroën 2CV, and drove to the start of the French Way. Stopping at every junction where a walker might hesitate, he painted an arrow. His family says he chose yellow deliberately, noticing France used it to mark mountain routes; others say the paint was simply what was left over from road works. Both may be true.

One story, which may say something about the priest’s sense of humor, says that the Civil Guard once stopped him mid-arrow and asked what he thought he was doing. He told them he was preparing the invasion.

Valiña painted the Camino Francés, not this route. But the symbol he invented in 1984 is now the only official directional marker on every Jacobean way in Spain — including the one that runs through Tarazona. A network that began in the 820s still draws pilgrims to the hills of Spain.

The 17th-century main altarpiece beneath the cimborrio, the 24-meter (about 79-foot) lantern tower. The vault paintings above date from the 1560s. Behind a small grille beneath the Virgin sit the relics of San Atilano, carried in procession each 28 August. ©Dawn Damico

The Cathedral of Santa María de la Huerta is a physical representation of cultural coexistence, a theme seen throughout the Aragón region. The church has Gothic bones, a Mudéjar tower and lantern, and a Renaissance cloister. The Mudéjar work is the signature of Muslim craftsmen.

To the casual observer, the building and art is beautiful. To history enthusiasts, its story is fascinating.

Most town cathedrals sit at the heart of the city. Tarazona’s Santa María de la Huerta sits outside it — across the Queiles, on the land that gave it its name (de la Huerta = of the Garden).

If you want to understand Tarazona history in one building, this is it. The cathedral is a physical record of three cultures.

The Gothic came first. So early, and so foreign to Spain, that only French master builders could have created it. Then, after the building was badly damaged in a 14th-century war between Castile and Aragón, Muslim craftsmen rebuilt its cloister, tower, and lantern in the Mudéjar style. That style is the art of Islamic artisans working for Christian patrons that UNESCO named a World Heritage tradition in 2001. It’s an artistic expression born of coexistence among cultures in the same place.

In Tarazona, that coexistence is not simply engraved on a plaque. It is carved in stone and woven through the neighborhoods of the city.

What makes the cathedral worth a visit, though, is what took nearly three decades of restoration to uncover. The work won two of the highest honors in European heritage, the Europa Nostra Award and the Europae Thesauri distinction. But the real reward was discovery.

As the scaffolding went up and the layers came off, restorers found Renaissance frescoes that had been plastered over for centuries. They found Gothic paintings of medieval bestiary creatures, and the successive coats of color the cathedral had worn across 800 years.

Among the finds were vault paintings of prophets and sibyls, made in the 1560s, that call to mind Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling. The interior you walk through now is not a frozen monument. It is a building that gave up its secrets slowly, and a tour tells the story of what was found.

If you have time, you can take the Kiborion experience. It’s a climb up onto the terraces and vaults and into the cimborrio, the 24-meter (about 79-foot) lantern tower, for the best view in Tarazona. We didn’t have time for it on this visit, but it’s something I would plan for on a return trip.

Note: The cathedral is closed during Cipotegato.

The town hall’s carved façade, dense with heraldry, figures, and a frieze of processional scenes.   ©Dawn Damico

From nearly anywhere in town, the mountain is there. Moncayo Natural Park spreads out above the town with marked trails for every experience level. The park spans nearly 2,000 meters (over 6500 feet) of vertical range. You’ll find Mediterranean scrub at the bottom to beech forest and bare high pasture near the top.

Local guides run interpretive hikes or all-terrain vehicle excursions. There are signposted trail-running circuits laid out and graded by local runners, and mountain-biking routes threading the comarca toward villages like El Buste and Santa Cruz de Moncayo.

For a trail that gets you outside without the climb, the Vía Verde del Tarazonica is a greenway built on the bed of the railway that once linked Tarazona to Tudela. The line is gone, but remnants remain: original stations, platforms, and engine sheds stand along the route. Walkers, runners, and cyclists have replaced the trains. The path is level, easy, and follows the same waterway that made the town.

It is the simplest way to feel the shape of this country. Tarazona Monumental keeps current maps, trail listings, and outfitter contacts for hiking, biking, trail running, and the greenway.

Link for Tarazona Outdoor Experiences

The Eye of Saint John

One spot you might find when hiking is Ojo de San Juan – the Eye of Saint John. This is the spring that rises beside the hermitage dedicated to John the Baptist.

In 1638, the town collected the water into a stone pool that served as a washhouse. From there it runs underground, beneath the streets, through the Selcos channel, and out to the market gardens that still surround the town.

That water begins upstream in the Moncayo, and is said to be the second most powerful spring in all of Europe. The medieval spa culture that grew up around these mineral springs was partly responsible for Tarazona’s popularity.

Two legends are connected to the Eye of Saint John. The first explains the grapevine. In Roman times, the story goes, a drought settled over the region and held for twenty years, until every field around Tarazona had died. One vine survived — a single grapevine, growing at the mouth of the spring. From that one plant the whole foothill country was replanted. Tradition holds that this is why a vine grows on Tarazona’s coat of arms.

The second legend tells of a shepherd named Sebastián who carved a colodra, a wooden pail, as a gift for a woman named Justina. He lost it in the waters. Years later, having become a gardener in Tarazona, he found the same pail beneath a bramble while watering a field. The discovery revealed the hidden source of the spring. Word reached the wali, the Muslim governor, that Sebastián knew where the town’s water came from.

The shepherd refused to expose the source of the water, afraid the knowledge could be used to poison the spring his people drank from. He died for that silence, and the peace between Muslims and Christians in Tarazona broke. It was Justina who ended the conflict. She went to the wali and threatened to reveal the secret herself unless the fighting stopped. It worked.

Inside the Bishops’ Palace, conservators from the Fundación Tarazona Monumental work on a gilded frame and a polychrome sculpture.  ©Dawn Damico

Anybody who has ever remodeled a house can appreciate what kind of surprises you can find when you start tearing things down. In Tarazona, you cannot open a wall without finding history behind it.

The proof is inside the Palacio Episcopal, the Bishops’ Palace. This is where I got my first elevated view of the city and a glimpse inside the everyday life of a Bishop. The place itself is both simple and elegant. We were fortunate, however, to take a look beyond the walls.

At some point around 2011, the Fundación Tarazona Monumental decided to convert a corner of the palace, the old porter’s flat, into a restoration workshop. As part of that project, they opened a wall between two rooms revealing a brick diaphragm arch, original to this part of the building, dating to the 14th century. The renovation that began as a way to add space for the restorers doing important work in the city, ended up recovering a piece of the palace’s own medieval architecture.

It wasn’t a planned experience, but seeing where conservators care for the movable pieces of Tarazona’s heritage, the paintings, frames, and sculptures that fill the city’s churches and collections was a special treat.

Specialists surrounded by gilded frames, old canvas stretched face-down onto a fresh support for relining, solvent jars, paints, brushes, and notes worked patiently and meticulously, one tiny step at a time. It’s largely invisible work. Quiet. It changes how you look at every polished altarpiece afterward.

Two pieces caught my attention. On the easel stood an oval painting with a bearded man in a red-sleeved robe holding his own severed head in front of his chest. A cephalophore, a martyr saint carrying the very thing he had lost.

Nearby, the same saint appeared again in sculpted form. A conservator was working on the body while the carved head lay on the table beside it. By that point our group had a little joke about how many historical figures had lost their heads and how elaborately it is portrayed in centuries-old art.

A white stork on its nest above the cathedral’s Mudéjar pinnacles, with their green-and-purple glazed tile. The birds return to Aragón each year in late winter and settle on the same nests.   ©Dawn Damico

We came to this corner of Aragón for the vineyards. Tarazona was meant to be a stop on the way — a place to stretch, look around, and move on toward the old-vine Garnacha that had drawn us here in the first place.

What struck me was Tarazona is not a tourist town. There were no crowds lining up for entrance, no gauntlet of souvenir stalls, none of the polish a big city puts on for visitors.

What it has instead is harder to manufacture: people who love where they live, and who love their city’s history and culture enough to spend years digging it out and telling it.

You feel it in a cathedral that gave up its secrets over three decades of restoration, in a workshop where someone is patiently rejoining a saint to his head, in a bullring full of apartments where families still hang their laundry over the ring. The story of this place is not finished, and the people who live here are the ones actively telling it.

That is the kind of thing a traveler who pays attention doesn’t miss. You don’t have to share a town’s faith or trace your heritage to its streets to be moved by its history. More often, learning a place’s story is what gives you the fuller picture of it, and of the people who carry it forward.

In Tarazona, that story is told with obvious pride, wrapped in a blanket of architecture and tradition, and offered freely to anyone curious enough to stay a little longer than they planned.

If you go

Tarazona is a natural gateway to Campo de Borja, the Garnacha country immediately east, where the vines climb Moncayo’s lower slopes. The cierzo, the cold northwest wind that seems to want to knock you off your feet, is an ever-present character in every Aragonese story. It runs down off the mountain and challenges the vines row by row, making them hardy and healthy.

The city is about 84 kilometers, or roughly 52 miles, from Zaragoza. It is a short drive most travelers do in an afternoon, but depending on your interests you could enjoy more time in the city.

Because Tarazona isn’t a conventional tourist destination, I’d start at the tourism office. You can navigate the town on your own, but a few minutes there will surface things you’d otherwise walk right past. They can help shape a visit around what actually interests you, whether that’s the Mudéjar architecture, the Camino, or the wine country beyond.

Turespaña, Los Angeles hosted this trip in March, 2026. All reporting and opinions of the author are her own.