Logbook · 2 places

What to see and do in Belmonte de Gracián

What to see and do in Belmonte de Gracián (Comunidad de Calatayud, Zaragoza): 2 places across monuments, nature, activities and curiosities, with a photo and a Google Maps location.

1 Villages · 1 Historical milestones

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Spain › Aragon › Zaragoza › Comunidad de Calatayud › Belmonte de Gracián

What to see and do in Belmonte de Gracián

Belmonte de Gracián
Village
Belmonte de Gracián is a municipality in the province of Zaragoza, 12 km from Calatayud, with 183 inhabitants (INE 2025) compared with the 825 it had in the mid-19th century. Its name has changed several times: it was successively called Belmonte del Río Perejiles, Belmonte de Peregil and Belmonte de Calatayud, until in 1985 it took its current name in homage to the Jesuit Baltasar Gracián, born here in 1601 and author of El Criticón and the Oráculo manual y arte de prudencia. In its old town the Mudéjar tower of the church of San Miguel stands out, whose lower section may be of Islamic construction; also preserved are the castle-palace of Belmonte de Gracián and the chapel of Nuestra Señora del Castillo. Nearby are the Celtiberian site of Segeda and the Fuente del Despeño.
Birth of Baltasar Gracián
Historical milestone
In this village in the province of Zaragoza, in the comarca of Calatayud, the Jesuit and writer Baltasar Gracián was born on 8 January 1601, one of the great figures of Spanish conceptismo of the Golden Age and author of El Criticón, an allegorical novel compared in quality to Don Quixote or La Celestina, and of the Oráculo manual y arte de prudencia. His prose, dense and full of brief maxims and wordplay, reflects a pessimistic thought typical of the Baroque, and in time influenced thinkers such as La Rochefoucauld, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. The town was called Belmonte del Río Perejiles and later Belmonte de Calatayud, and in 1985 it took the writer's surname, who died in Tarazona in 1658, as a tribute to its best-known resident.