However, right there, where Plaza de Europa meets Santa Lucía and beside the sculpture that now occupies the space, Zaragoza once opened one of its old gateways to the outside world. It was one of the entrances to the walled city and marked the boundary between Zaragoza, protected by its walls, and the open countryside of La Almozara.
For centuries, it marked where Zaragoza ended and the lands stretching beyond its walls began
A place now fully integrated into the urban landscape that, for centuries, marked where Zaragoza ended and the lands stretching beyond its walls began.
PUERTA DE SANCHO BETWEEN THE ORCHARDS AND EXILE
It was called Puerta de Sancho, although it has not been confirmed whom the name referred to. One of the most widely held theories links it to King Sancho Ramírez. It has been documented since 1180, in texts concerning the mills that stood nearby.
It was not a monumental entrance, but a modest structure with a single arch, built into the brick wall without the flourishes displayed by other city gates. That was how the chronicler Vicente Andrés described it in 1860 in his Guía de Zaragoza, which also attributed no artistic merit to it.
Crossing Zaragoza's Plaza de Europa toward the Ebro today means navigating traffic and the comings and goings of those heading for the river
Its importance lay precisely in that modesty, because it connected urban Zaragoza with an agricultural area that was fundamental to the city's daily life: the orchards of La Almozara, crisscrossed by irrigation channels and paths and closely linked to Zaragoza's food supply. Farmers regularly left through it on their way to their fields and, in far less friendly circumstances, so did those sentenced to exile. Thus, depending on who crossed it, the same arch served as a passage to work or as the boundary of a city that was no longer theirs.
THE RENOVALES BASTION THAT RESISTED THE FRENCH
That dual role changed completely in the summer of 1808. During the First Siege of Zaragoza, Puerta de Sancho ceased to be an exit to the orchards and became a defensive position, and Palafox ultimately entrusted its defense to Colonel Mariano Renovales, one of the military officers who took part in the resistance against Napoleonic troops. The scene was captured in Batería de la Puerta de Sancho, an engraving by Juan Gálvez and Fernando Brambila made a few years after the Sieges.
It shows the defensive position among parapets, soldiers and artillery pieces, while in the background, through the smoke, the silhouette of the Aljafería can be seen. At the center stands a large flour mill that the defenders used as a strongpoint from which to build the battery. Few images explain better how much this corner of Zaragoza has changed, because where buses and cars pass today, a walled city was then urgently defending itself.
PUERTA DE SANCHO DISAPPEARED, BUT RETURNED TO A WALL
The gate's story did not end with the Sieges. It continued for much of the 19th century, as Zaragoza gradually began shedding its old walls and entrances, which no longer met the needs of an expanding city. It was demolished in late 1868 and later replaced by a new brick-and-wood entrance.
Farmers from La Almozara protested against the restrictions on passage, eventually securing opening and closing times that did not limit their journeys to the orchards. That solution was not definitive either; in 1904, Puerta de Sancho disappeared completely, while Zaragoza rapidly transformed its urban landscape and the old boundary between the city and the orchards gradually lost its meaning, until only the name remained.
The city government restored the gate's memory through a mural
That oblivion was not permanent. In 2008, the city government restored the gate's memory through a mural that Fabiola Gil Alarés and Vicente Gómez Arbiol painted on a wall of the Fecetas convent, reproducing its image from an engraving that José Blasco Ijazo had recovered and brought to public attention. They had to reverse the orientation of the original print so that it would fit the available surface. The arch and the wall that supported it are gone, but the wall now allows visitors to imagine what that entrance looked like and, above all, exactly where it stood.
It is enough to walk along Santa Lucía and look toward Plaza de Europa for present-day Zaragoza to begin overlapping with the old city: the walled city beneath the traffic, the orchards of La Almozara beyond the wall, and between them an arch through which people passed for centuries on their way to work, returning from the fields or having been forced to leave Zaragoza. Puerta de Sancho has been gone for more than a century, and not a single stone remains, only an avenue that no one now associates with any arch. What is striking is that, with a little attention, it can still be found precisely where nothing remains.
