Teruel spent decades as the Spanish joke about forgotten provinces, until its people adopted the slogan Teruel existe, Teruel exists, and turned it into a political movement. Ride into the old centre and you will agree it exists rather vividly. The Torre del Salvador is one of its four great Mudéjar towers, built of brick and glazed ceramic in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries by craftsmen trained in the Islamic tradition. The road, or rather a street, still passes through an archway at its base, and you can climb inside, between the outer and inner shells of the tower, up narrow stairs to the bells.
The town loves a good legend, and the towers have one. The story goes that two Moorish builders, rivals for the same woman, each raised a tower: the Salvador and the San Martín. The San Martín came out slightly crooked, its builder threw himself from the top, and the Salvador's architect won the girl. Teruel's other famous romance is truer to its records, or at least to its tombs: the Lovers of Teruel, Isabel and Diego, whose tragic medieval story is told in a mausoleum next to the church of San Pedro, with their alabaster effigies reaching toward each other.
At around nine hundred metres, Teruel sits high on the plateau where the Turia and Alfambra rivers meet, and its climate is famously extreme: hot dry summers, bitter winter mornings. The riding around it is excellent. The A-23 motorway is fast and empty, but the real joy lies in the small roads into the Sierra de Albarracín or east into the Maestrazgo, with long climbs, open bends and almost no traffic. Distances are big, villages are small, and the colours shift from red clay to grey limestone to dark pine.
Teruel has fuel, mechanics and every service, so it makes a good base. Local ham, cured in the cold dry air, carries its own designation of origin and is worth ordering by the plate; the town also does migas, lamb and a fine selection of pastries. The old centre is compact and best explored on foot, with the Plaza del Torico, a square named after its tiny bull statue, at its heart. Park outside the narrowest streets, walk under the Salvador's arch, and look up at the green and white tiles, still bright after seven centuries.