Village
Ágreda is a Sorian town of around 3,100 inhabitants at the foot of the Moncayo, at the eastern edge of the Northern Meseta, head town of the district of Tierra de Ágreda and service centre for the north-east of the province; it is crossed by the río del Val, a tributary of the Queiles, whose slopes hold extensive market gardens. It was a Celtiberian and Roman hillfort, and its first documented records date back to the caliphal period, in the 11th century; Alfonso I the Battler reconquered it from the Arabs in 1119. Since 2008 it has been twinned with the state of New Mexico, and its historic centre has been a Bien de Interés Cultural (Spain's highest level of heritage protection) since 1994. On the Saturday after Corpus Christi, Ágreda celebrates the Virgen de los Milagros, patron saint of the town and of seventeen other villages in the district.
Monument
A horseshoe-arched gateway with interlocking voussoirs, in Caliphal style, opening onto what was once the Arab quarter of the town of Ágreda, within the walled precinct. It is one of two surviving gates out of the four the Arab wall originally had, and dates, like the wall, from the 10th century; it is one of the few Islamic gates still standing in the whole of Castile and the piece that best explains the town's Andalusi past.
Monument
Ágreda's interpretation centre occupies a building on Calle Mezquitas, in what was once the town's Arab quarter, next to the Arab wall. The sections of this wall that once encircled the town today house the centre, which explains the overlapping of Christian, Muslim and Jewish quarters within a single precinct through a route with visual and audiovisual material on the town's history. Admission is free, though a visit requires booking an appointment in advance with the tourist office or the town hall.
Monument
A Gothic church built in the late 15th century, which retains, attached to it, the old crenellated Romanesque bell tower of the 12th century and dominates with its bulk the townscape of Ágreda's old town, on the same square as the alhóndiga (grain exchange). The main chapel holds a notable altarpiece attributed to Pedro de Aponte or to the anonymous Master of Ágreda, one of the most important Mannerists of the first stage of Spanish Renaissance painting; the rest of the chapels are decorated with Gothic and Plateresque altarpieces. It also houses the chapel and altarpiece, a 16th-century work, of Doctor García Hernández de Carrascón, physician to Pope Adrian VI, and the building has five tiers divided by ogee mouldings, some decorated with balls.
Monument
The basilica of Nuestra Señora de los Milagros was built in the mid-16th century, in Gothic-Renaissance style, as part of the former Convent of San Agustín founded by the Fuenmayor and Camargo families; after the convent was disentailed in 1836, only the church remained standing, becoming the parish temple of the Virgen de los Milagros, patroness of Ágreda since Pope Paul III sanctioned her title in the 16th century. According to tradition, the image was found by shepherds from Yanguas in Extremaduran lands. The austere façade, flanked by two buttresses shaped like small towers, opens with an ashlar portal topped by a pediment bearing the alabaster carving of the Virgin; in its nave, covered by a star-ribbed vault, the gilded Baroque main altarpiece stands out.
Monument
The church of the Virgen de la Peña, in Ágreda, is the town's oldest temple: it dates from the 12th century and was consecrated in 1193 by Bishop Juan Frontín. It has a two-nave floor plan with pointed barrel vaults, of equal height but different width, and preserves a notable set of Gothic paintings, among them the six panels of a predella from the late 15th century depicting the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Nativity, the Adoration of the Magi, the Presentation and the Pietà. James I the Conqueror and Eleanor of Castile were married there. Having ceased to hold worship, it is today the seat of the Regional Museum of Sacred Art, with carvings, goldwork and panels from the emptied parishes of the Soria Moncayo.
Monument
A small twelfth-century Romanesque church stands on the site of the town's old synagogue, the most eloquent testimony of the Jewish quarter that coexisted here with Moors and Christians.
Monument
The Castejón Palace is the most important building of civil architecture in Ágreda, built in the early 17th century. It has a sober portal topped by a broken pediment with a coat of arms at its centre, a harmonious courtyard and a square rubble-stone tower with watchtowers. It preserves the Renaissance garden of don Diego de Castejón, a landscaped space uncommon in Soria's civil architecture and today open to the public alongside the palace.
Curiosity
The old Muslim quarter preserves the Fuente de los Caños and several defensive towers, among them those of La Muela, El Tirador and Costoya, besides the gate called of Felipe II, which gave entry to it.
Curiosity
The Conceptionist nun María Coronel y Arana (1602-1665) was abbess of the convent of La Concepción; missionaries and native people of New Mexico and Texas said they had seen her preaching without her ever leaving the cloister.
Historical milestone
For twenty-two years, between 1643 and 1665, the abbess kept up with the king a correspondence of more than six hundred letters in which she advised on political, military and financial matters: a unique case of female influence at court.
Curiosity
The book that Sister María wrote in the convent was published in 1670, underwent scrutiny by the Inquisition and ended up translated into some forty languages across nearly one hundred and seventy editions. Its full title is Mystica Ciudad de Dios, and it gathers the visions that the nun of Ágreda believed she received through divine inspiration and that of the Virgin Mary; it is divided into three parts, spread across eight books, covering the Virgin's childhood, the mystery of the Incarnation and the life of Jesus Christ, and the rest of Mary's earthly existence up to her Assumption and Coronation. Baroque in style and thorough in its descriptions, its translation into French caused some controversy, and the theologian Bossuet went so far as to harshly disparage it, which led to its temporary ban before the Church rectified matters.
Curiosity
In the church of the convent of La Concepción, founded by her in the seventeenth century, the body of Sor María de Jesús is preserved and displayed; Clement X declared her venerable a few years after her death.
Historical milestone
Alfonso I of Aragon took Ágreda from the Muslims that year; in 1135 Alfonso VII incorporated it into Castile, and the later coexistence of Christians, Jews and Muslims earned it the name of town of the three cultures.
Historical milestone
The king of Aragon married in 1221 in Ágreda Leonor of Castile, in a ceremony that brought the two courts together in this frontier town and that gives an idea of the diplomatic role the enclave played.
Historical milestone
The agreement signed in 1304, also known as the Arbitral Sentence of Torrellas, set the territorial boundaries between the crowns of Aragon and Castile, and left this town as a border stronghold, with everything that implied in terms of fueros and privileges. It was not the only pact between the two crowns to bear the name of Ágreda: other earlier treaties, of 1162, 1186 and 1281, were also signed under this same name.
Activity
From 29 September to 2 October the town celebrates its patron with bull runs and popular events; in spring, after Corpus, the pilgrimage festival of the Virgen de los Milagros gathers the villages of the comarca.