The former Temple Church in the Aragonese capital, which eventually gave the street its name, stood a few meters farther away, at the corner of Santa Isabel Street. That remarkable circular church was built more than 800 years ago over the remains of a Roman house, where a mosaic was even discovered. It is a small trace of Roman and medieval Zaragoza that remains hidden beneath one of the busiest areas in the city center.
Wall of the former house built over the Temple Church, possibly reused from the Templar construction. Photo: Wifredo Rincón García.
The Templars already owned property in Zaragoza when Ramon Berenguer IV reached an agreement in Girona with Pedro Rovira, a dignitary of the Order, for it to renounce the rights it held over the crown under the will of Alfonso the Battler, the childless king who had taken it upon himself to leave his kingdom to the military orders of Jerusalem. In exchange, the Templars secured an annual income of 1,000 sueldos in the city. A commander in Zaragoza is already recorded in 1148, and by around 1164 the commandery had a conventual house on the street. Its own church and cemetery came later, between the end of the 12th century and the early years of the 13th, confirmed by a 1204 document between Bishop Ramon de Castrocol and the friars, and by the will of Guisabel, who in 1207 requested to be buried in the Temple cemetery.
The church was circular inside and octagonal outside, with no apse—an unusual design traditionally associated with the model of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, though not exclusively. The main entrance opened to the west, from Temple Street, and inside there were several chapels, including one dedicated to Saint George, where Gil Tarín, a knight and merino of Zaragoza, was buried at the beginning of the 14th century.
The order did not get to enjoy its church for very long. In 1312, Pope Clement V decreed the suppression of the Temple, and its properties passed to the Knights Hospitaller of Saint John of Jerusalem. The Temple was brought to an end by the greed of Philip the Fair of France and the complicity of a papacy that preferred not to ask too many questions.
Not a photograph or engraving of that building survives. It exists only in the plans of the city, as a small circular geometry passed from map to map since the early 18th century. José María Quadrado saw it in 1844, converted into an “abject warehouse,” and Madoz described it again in 1850 in the same condition. It remained standing until 1860, when it was demolished and a house was built on the site.
That could have been the end of the story if, in October 1991, after the building on the corner of Temple and Santa Isabel was demolished, archaeological test excavations had not been opened under the direction of Francisco Casabona Sebastián and Jesús Ángel Pérez Casas. The complete layout of the church appeared, along with the remains of a 1st-century Roman domus beneath it, featuring a polychrome geometric mosaic and opus spicatum floors. It made the news for a few days. But a plot in the historic center has an owner facing construction deadlines, not a museum waiting for visitors, and what followed was complete destruction. Excavators ended up destroying what remained of the circular structure. The medieval walls had in fact already been reused a century earlier in the house built after the 1860 demolition. Today, no visible trace remains of the church’s layout—not a plaque, an archaeological viewing window or a line in the pavement.
The street remains. No one passing through will find a sign indicating that a Templar church once stood there, a stone marking its layout or any visible trace of that Roman house. All that remains is the street’s name, the last piece of that complex to survive the Templars, the Hospitallers, the confiscation of church property and two centuries of urban transformation.
The church disappeared for the first time in 1860, when it was demolished to make way for a tenement building. It disappeared again in 1991, when archaeology revealed exactly what lay beneath that house and the construction work ended up erasing what had just been found. The street kept the name Temple. Of the Temple, however, the street preserves nothing.
