Ask a rider where the best quiet roads in Aragon are and, sooner or later, someone says Matarraña. It is the river and the district at the southern end of Teruel province, a land of olive terraces, almond orchards, honey-coloured villages and low limestone ridges, and people in Zaragoza call it the Tuscany of Aragon without any irony. The Cueva de la Font de la Bernarda sits in the hills a few kilometres from Calaceite, with Valderrobres just over the hill and the Catalan border not far beyond.
Calaceite itself is a handsome little town of arcaded squares and Renaissance and Baroque houses, and it has fuel, bakeries and several places for a long lunch. Valderrobres, ten kilometres away, is the showpiece: a medieval fortified bridge over the Matarraña, a castle-palace of the archbishops of Zaragoza above it, and a Gothic church with a tall bell tower. If the light is right the reflection of the whole composition in the river is one of the best sights in the region. The local olive oil, protected under the Bajo Aragón designation, is worth putting in your panniers.
The roads between these villages are what riders come for. Smooth surface, light traffic, sequences of medium-radius bends over low passes, and in spring a green and gold landscape that makes you slow down, though summer heat can be fierce and the wind, the cierzo, can blow hard from the north-west. Out towards Alcañiz, twenty-eight kilometres away, you will find MotorLand, the circuit that hosts the Aragon MotoGP round, and the town itself has the larger shops and workshops you might need.
As for the cave, the area has a series of small rock shelters with paintings in the Levantine tradition, made by hunters and gatherers long before the Iberians built their hilltop villages here. Many are hard to find without a guide or local signs, and the terrain around them is rough scrub and rock, so wear boots and look closely. Valcomuna and the Ermites shelters share the same landscape, so you can spend a long, slow day in a district where history is layered up like pastry.