Aljafería

Overview

The Aljafería is an 11th-century Islamic palace on the western side of central Zaragoza, built by the taifa kings of Saraqusta and now the working seat of the Cortes de Aragón, the regional parliament. It is the only large surviving example of Spanish Islamic architecture from the taifa era, the decades of splinter kingdoms between the collapse of the Córdoba caliphate and the Almoravid invasion.

What you get for the €7 ticket is three palaces stacked on one another and a fortress wrapped round the lot. The taifa core sits at ground level: a garden courtyard with a pool at one end, arcades of interlocking arches, and a private oratory with its mihrab still in place. Above it are the rooms Peter IV of Aragón added in the 14th century, and above those the palace the Catholic Monarchs built in the 1490s, with a coffered ceiling that runs 20 metres end to end.

The parliament half is not a gimmick. Deputies sit here, the building is owned by Zaragoza City Council and a section of it was handed to the Cortes on a 99-year transfer after a 1984 commission picked the site. The monument and the institution share a front door, a security scanner and a diary.

The palace usually gets named alongside the Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba and the Alhambra as one of the three great survivals of Hispano-Muslim architecture, and it is the oldest of them by two centuries. The interlocking mixtilinear arch, the shape that later covers half of Granada, appears here first. Ninety minutes covers the circuit at a decent pace.

History

The oldest thing on the site is the squat tower in the north wall, later christened the Torre del Trovador. It is a quadrangular defensive block of five floors dating to the end of the 9th century under Muhammad Alanqur of the Banu Tujib, appointed by the emir of Córdoba, although the archaeologist Bernabé Cabañero Subiza argues for the second half of the 10th. The only way in was a small door set high in the wall, reached by a portable ladder. Its ground floor still has the 9th-century horseshoe arcades.

The palace proper went up between 1065 and 1081 for Abú Ja’far Ahmad ibn Sulaymán al-Muqtadir, second king of the Banu Hud dynasty, to a design credited to a Slav architect named Al-Halifa Zuhayr. Al-Muqtadir called it Qasr al-Surur, the Palace of Joy, and his throne room Maylis al-Dahab, the Golden Hall, in verses that survive: “Oh Palace of Joy, oh Golden Hall, because of you I reached the maximum of my wishes.” The plan copies the desert castles of Syria and Jordan, a walled square with round towers and a tripartite interior, and the palace originally stood outside the Roman walls of the city on open plain.

Alfonso I took Zaragoza in 1118 and the building became the residence of the Christian kings of Aragón without much structural change. The Infanta Elizabeth of Aragón, queen of Portugal from 1282, was born here, and the main courtyard carries her name. Peter IV “the Ceremonious” extended the palace in 1336 and built the Chapel of San Martín in the outer courtyard. In his reign the Aljafería is recorded as the starting point of the procession to the Cathedral of the Saviour, where Aragonese kings were crowned and swore the fueros.

Ferdinand and Isabella built the last royal phase between 1488 and 1495, on the north wing, using Mudéjar craftsmen who kept working in plaster and carved wood. The Throne Room frieze carries a Latin inscription naming both monarchs and dating the work to 1492. Look up in the antechambers and the ceiling motifs are the yoke, the arrows and the Gordian knot with the motto “Tanto monta”.

Then the building’s luck turned. In 1486 the courtyard of San Martín was handed to the Tribunal of the Holy Office, and the Troubadour Tower became a cell block.

The Sienese military engineer Tiburcio Spannocchi drew the fortress in 1593: a ring wall ending in four pentagonal bastions, whose bases you walk past today, and a moat 20 metres wide crossed by two drawbridges. French companies were quartered here in 1705 during the War of the Spanish Succession. Charles III converted the whole thing into barracks in 1772, flattening the interior into soldiers’ quarters around a parade ground in the western third. Isabella II added four neo-Gothic corner towers in 1862; two of them, northwest and southwest, are still standing.

UNESCO added the Aljafería’s original structures to the Mudéjar Architecture of Aragon World Heritage listing in 2001, and the Cortes claim more than four million visitors since restoration resumed in the mid-1980s. The tower’s other afterlife is literary: Antonio García Gutiérrez set his 1836 drama El Trovador largely in the palace, Verdi turned it into Il trovatore, and the tower took its name from the play rather than the other way round.

Visiting

General admission is €7 and no reservation is needed; you can buy at the desk or online at tickets.aljaferia.es. From 1 April to 31 October the palace opens daily 10:00 to 18:00. From 1 November to 31 March it runs 10:00 to 18:00 Monday to Saturday and 10:00 to 14:00 on Sundays, with no winter Sunday afternoon. Last entry is half an hour before closing and the ticket desk stops selling 45 minutes before, so a 17:30 arrival in summer is cutting it fine.

You come in through Spannocchi’s outer wall and across the moat, then into the courtyard of San Martín, where the Gothic-Mudéjar chapel stands against the northwest corner with a brick portal framed by a double alfiz in a chequered pattern. This is also the yard the Inquisition occupied. Beyond it the route drops into the taifa palace.

The Patio de Santa Isabel is the heart of the visit: a rectangle of orange trees and marble walkways with porticos at the north and south ends. The southern pool is the original; the northern one was floored over in wood in the 14th century. The south portico carries the busiest carving in the building, multilobed arches with interlacing so dense it reads as lacework. Stand at the south end and look north: the arcade, the porch behind it and the Troubadour Tower rising over the roofline were composed as one view, with the king framed in a blind arch at the back of the Golden Hall.

Go into the Golden Hall through the triple opening in the north wall, five paired marble columns under four mixtilinear arches. Most of the polychrome plaster is gone, some of it in the Museo de Zaragoza and the National Archaeological Museum in Madrid, but the arch structure is intact and fragments of red, blue and gold survive on the friezes. At the east end of the entrance portico is the small private mosque: a square room chamfered into a false octagon, with the mihrab niche in the southeast corner under a horseshoe arch of alternating voussoirs copied from Córdoba. It is the one space that keeps 11th-century painted decoration, uncovered by Íñiguez under later limewash.

Upstairs you cross into two later palaces in quick succession. Peter IV’s three long rectangular halls sit on the north sector under wooden Mudéjar ceilings, one small square chamber roofed with an octagonal wooden dome directly above the mosque. Then the noble staircase climbs in two flights under geometric plaster gables painted with the yoke and arrows to the Palace of the Catholic Monarchs. Three small waiting rooms, the “rooms of the lost steps”, look through lattice windows onto the courtyard of San Martín; only two are open, the third having been sacrificed when the mosque dome was replaced.

The Troubadour Tower is the last stop and the plainest: bare alabaster masonry, narrow embrasures, prisoners’ graffiti cut into the walls over three centuries of use as a cell. The 14th-century upper floors are pointed and Mudéjar, the lower ones Islamic and heavy, and a corridor links the tower to Peter IV’s rooms.

Interpretation on site is thin by design. Follow the marked route, then use the QR codes placed through the monument with the palace’s own app, or pick up one of the printed brochures, available in seven languages. One extra draw at the moment: the Museo de Zaragoza’s Goya collection has been rehoused here as “Goya. Del museo al Palacio” while that museum is closed for refurbishment, so part of your circuit is paintings rather than plasterwork.

Tips

• Entry is free on the first Sunday and the first Monday of every month. Also free, on production of ID at the desk: under-12s, jobseekers, holders of a large-family or single-parent card, and anyone with a disability of 33% or more plus one companion if the companion is needed for the visit.

• The reduced ticket is €2 for over-65s, students and Carné Joven holders, which is worth the two minutes it takes to dig out the card. Arrive on the Zaragoza Turismo tourist bus and you pay €4.

• Groups of ten or more pay €5 a head but must book at least 24 hours ahead, and a palace guide pushes it to €7 each. Every group has to use a radio guide system with headsets, palace guides excepted.

• Winter Sundays end at 14:00, and the palace is shut on 1 January, 23 April and 25 December. The opening-hours pop-up on the site lists only 1 January and 25 December, so treat 23 April, Aragón’s Saint George’s day, as the one to double-check.

• Every bag goes through a security scanner, and anything too big for it cannot come in. The left-luggage lockers are free, released by a returnable coin, and they fill up at busy times, when only items that genuinely cannot be carried through the rooms are accepted.

• Photography is fine without flash. Flash is banned outright, as is touching the columns, plasterwork, tiles, doors and glass, which in a building held together by 11th-century stucco is not a formality.

• No eating or drinking anywhere except the Cortes de Aragón cafeteria, and no scooters, skateboards or bicycles past the door. Under-14s cannot enter alone and need an adult with them throughout.

• Animals are not allowed, with the exception of assistance dogs under Aragón’s Law 14/2023 of 30 March.