Balneario de Paracuellos de Jiloca

Balneario de Paracuellos de Jiloca draws bicarbonated spring water in the Jiloca valley of inland Aragon, in a landscape of cereal plains, mudejar brick towers, and limestone escarpments that forms the historic heartland of Aragonese Islamic-Christian architectural synthesis, the decorative tradition known as mudejar that blends Gothic structural logic with Islamic geometric ornament in the brick campaniles and apse towers of the Aragon interior. Calatayud, twenty kilometres to the northwest, contains the highest concentration of mudejar towers in Spain, its skyline punctuated by polychrome brick minarets of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that earned the Aragonese mudejar its UNESCO World Heritage designation and make Calatayud one of the most architecturally surprising secondary cities in Spain. The mineral waters of Paracuellos, used for digestive and renal conditions, flow in a valley where the mudejar inheritance is visible in every village campanile and where the Roman ruins at Bilbilis, birthplace of the satirist Martial, add an ancient depth to the already layered Aragonese landscape.