Fitero: Monastery, Frontier, Baths

The name Fitero means frontier, because in the 12th century the monastery here sat on the line between Castile and Navarre and between the dioceses of Calahorra and Tarazona. Saint Raymond of Fitero founded the monastery with Cistercians from the abbey of Escaladieu in the high Pyrenees, on a donation from Alfonso VII in 1140. He then raised a Cistercian militia, took it to Calatrava, and out of it came the Military Order of Calatrava. He never got his own monastery back: his monks were beaten and driven to Calahorra, a second Cistercian community arrived in 1161 under a new abbot, and Raymond died in exile at Ciruelos. Downstream on the Alhama are the baths, in use since Roman Tudején, now a working spa on hot mineral water with a Moorish bath structure underneath the 19th-century buildings.