It is the most important of the towns founded in the Jalón valley thanks to its strategic situation as a crossroads for communication routes and its privileged natural location.

The Roman Bílbilis, located some six kilometres from the city, was the first large city in the area, although settlement on the riverbank is documented as far back as the Celtiberian period, where the Muslim foundation took place and where the most important fortified complex of the medieval period was built, with not only an impregnable natural enclave, but also the spectacular defensive construction – whose toponym “castle of Ayyub” means “Job’s fortress” and from which the present city takes its name. The earliest records in Arabic sources date from the emirate of Muhammad I, between 852 and 886, when the fortress was transformed into a city. This documented fact will determine the characterisation of the defensive enclave defined by five castles (Doña Martina, La Peña, La Torre Mocha, El Mayor and El Real) and long stretches of walls that protected both the inhabited farmhouse and areas of countryside and orchards that are currently built up.

After the Christian reconquest in 1120, the Christian city began to flourish, and in a short time it began to build, in a beautifully Muslim urban layout, a good number of civil and religious buildings in which the main style was Mudejar, conserving areas with an unquestionable Muslim and Jewish flavour, in the areas known as the Morería and the Judería.

Located at the crossroads of the River Jalón with the River Manubles and the Mesa-Piedra, its historically strategic location has led to settlements in the area since the Eneolithic period, with finds documented in numerous places in the municipality.

The Islamic legacy of Ateca can be seen in the Arabic toponym from which its name “la antigua” derives, and is reflected in an attractive hamlet that is built on an urban layout of Islamic character with steep slopes, twists, turns and cul-de-sacs or covered passages, on which stand large houses with high, closed walls. The complex dialogues with the landscape marked by the use of water resources and draws attention to the system of irrigation channels, the most important element of which is the Canal del Val aqueduct.

But if there is one thing that is striking about the town, it is its group of towers. The Mudejar tower of the church of Santa María, dated, according to professor Gonzalo M. Borrás Gualis, to the second half of the 13th century, is the oldest part of the complex, prior to the Mudejar church, and is totally free-standing at the foot of the church and displaced from its axis. Both its structure and its ornamental elements, somewhat archaic for the time, follow the Almohad Islamic tradition, built by Aragonese Moorish masters, perhaps following the local tradition of minarets in the region but in any case built as a Christian bell tower. In 1560, the Clock Tower was built, commissioned by the council to the master builders Domingo and Ameçot to house the new clock that was to regulate the life of the city.