Rural school in motion: evaluation and proposal session

This week, the team and groups that make up the project “Rural school in motion” met in order to evaluate the results of the training course for rural school teachers that finished on March 22nd. The initiative has been a success in terms of participation and has allowed us to collect proposals for strategic lines to introduce the Mudejar heritage identity in schools beyond the artistic subjects.

This initiative has been made possible thanks to the teachers who have participated in this project and to the general directorate of education of the Government of Aragon through the Teacher Training programmes.The Government of Aragon,

which has given us support for the first action of the project at the Centro de Profesorado María de Ávila with the magnificent coordination of Minerva Salanova Muñoz.

We are still working to develop more actions within this initiative, which we will be detailing, among them: conferences for families and local agents and group visits.

“Rural school in motion” is a cooperation project between rural development groups coordinated by the ADRI Calatayud-Aranda group, together with Cedemar, Adefo Cinco Villas, Asomo Moncayo, Adrae Comarca Alta del Ebro, Fedivalca y Adri Jiloca Gallocanta, and financed by the Government of Aragon through the Leader programme and the Provincial Council of Zaragoza through the Territorio Mudéjar association, as a private collaborating entity that manages the implementation and execution of the initiative.

More information about the .

Third MOMAr meeting: exchange of international good practices

The pedagogical nature and the use of new technologies in the field of heritage management were the focus of the third interregional meeting of the European project MOMAr (IEEE3 From theory to practice.Experimental Models of Management Tested) in which we have participated this week as an attending “stakeholder”.

This event has allowed us to learn and be inspired by the initiatives that are being carried out in the field of Management of Singular Rural Heritage in all the countries participating in the project. This meeting has also allowed the use of cultural and natural spaces for the direct benefit and enjoyment of the population.

Thus, the Daroca Town Hall announced the International Early Music Festival, which, with almost half a century of history, has become a world reference. Both training courses and concerts are attended every year by hundreds of professionals and lovers of early music from all over the world. It is a meeting that brings together the immense local architectural and historical heritage with international art and culture. The festival’s director, Javier Artigas, took the opportunity to confirm that this year’s edition will take place from 3 to 10 August. The broadcast of this experience was made from the church of San Miguel.

Territorio Mudéjar Routes: Mestizo Land and borderland

Territorio Mudéjar continues with its routes.In January we offered a first panoramic approach in the magazine La magia de viajar por Aragón (The magic of travelling in Aragon); in this new issue, the “Mestizo Land and borderland” route takes us to visit the places where the Christian, Jewish and Muslim cultures developed in an extraordinary and lasting way.

We will be able to understand how this period of cultural fusion is still clearly reflected today in urbanism, the country houses and monuments of these villages that played an important role in the Aragonese territory during the 12th and 13th centuries.

We will discover it in the Jewish, Moorish and Christian quarters of large urban centres such as Calatayud, Daroca and Borja, as well as in more rural towns such as Villafeliche, Mesones de Isuela, Torrellas, Magallón and Tauste.

We invite you to take a leisurely stroll and a fresh look to recognise the vestiges of this rich coexistence of cultures, to understand their evolution, ways of life, trades and traditions, and to understand their historical importance and their reflection in the present day.

Find out more about the route.

Nearly 50 teachers participate in the course “Rural school in motion” (Circular desde la escuela rural) to promote Mudejar identity and rural rootedness

Nearly 50 teachers participate in the course “Rural school in motion” (Circular desde la escuela rural) to promote Mudejar identity and rural rootedness. Most of those enrolled are active teachers in rural schools in some 20 towns.

This is the first training action of a cooperation project between rural development groups coordinated by the ADRI Calatayud-Aranda; CEDEMAR Ribera Baja del Ebro and Bajo Aragón-Caspe; ADEFO Cinco Villas; ASOMO Moncayo; ADRAE Ribera Alta del Ebro; FEDIVALCA Valdejalón and Campo de Cariñena; and ADRI Jiloca-Gallocanta, with the participation of Territorio Mudéjar as a collaborating private entity responsible for the implementation of the project.

The project, which lasts 18 months, is financed by the Leader programme of the Government of Aragon and the Council of Zaragoza through the association Territorio Mudéjar.

The first session of this course – which links education, heritage and innovation – was held on 15 February and will continue on 22 February and 1, 8 and 15 March. In these sessions, participants will learn how to take the first steps in the development of educational materials around the Mudejar identity of the villages, placing the rural schools and the educational community of the villages at the centre of the project.

The initiative has received a good response from the public and includes teachers from towns of Territorio Mudéjar such as Quinto (CEIP Fernando el Católico) Calatayud (CEIP Salvador Minguijón), Ateca (CEIP Virgen de la Peana), Villarreal de Huerva and Romanos (CRA Fernando el Católico), Mainar (CEIP Santa Ana), Ricla (CRA Maestro Monreal); Aniñón, Cervera de la Cañada and Torralba de Ribota (CRA Río Ribota), Magallón (CRA La Huecha), San Mateo de Gállego (CEIP Galo Ponte), Alagón, Tobed and Mesones de Isuela (CRA Vicort Isuela). It has also been very well received throughout Aragon with teachers from the schools of Utrillas, Escucha, Híjar, Zaidín, Villarroya de la Sierra and Zaragoza. People linked to education who are interested in the project have also signed up.

At a global level, this initiative has a triple purpose: to work on the introduction of the Mudejar heritage identity in the work programmes of schools beyond the artistic or complementary areas; to involve the educational community in the valuation of the Mudejar heritage as part of their personal history, which favours the knowledge, conservation and dissemination of the identity of the towns; and to use the work carried out in schools as material for dissemination and tourist use on the Mudejar heritage of the villages for family and children audiences.

The starting point for this course is the working methodology and the results of the pilot project that was carried out in the CRA Vicort Isuela during the 2018-2019 academic year and which is the starting point for the implementation of the project in the schools of the villages of Territorio Mudéjar.

The course will be taught by Laura Castejón and Víctor Gumiel, teachers who carried out the design and testing of the pilot project, and Victoria E. Trasobares, director of Territorio Mudéjar who has extensive experience in the management and implementation of Mudéjar heritage management projects in rural areas.

More information about the .

Second MOMAr meeting: Territorio Mudéjar as a hub for rural innovation

Territorio Mudéjar has participated this Thursday in the second meeting of the European project MOMAr, a pioneering meeting with entities of the province linked to cultural heritage.

The event, with the aim of being a meeting point and a space to create new synergies within the sector, was held in an on-line format open to the public, with the participation of more than 50 professionals linked to heritage management and a streaming audience of more than 200 interested people.

In the session, we explained how we work to be a hub of rural innovation and follow strategies of:

  • Research: with stays and professional internships in rural areas.
  • Communication, dissemination and knowledge: with the inhabitants as protagonists, working to attract national and international entities to the territory, taking advantage of the World Heritage brand; and working carefully with the media.
  • Investment and future projects: Working with specialised teams in calls for funding and building virtual workspaces to strengthen collaboration strategies.

In addition, we have explained our role based on:

  • Use the heritage space from a disruptive point of view and directly linked to the local development of the communities.
  • The strengthening of historical-artistic heritage management thinking as a strategy, which affects multiple actions, and cultural management as a tool.
  • Attraction of professionals to the rural environment on a permanent basis, facilitating its implementation.
  • The evidence that the only way to have more significant results is through the strengthening of networking and the acquisition of roles within the network.
  • The need to exchange good practices without losing sight of the fact that it is not enough to replicate but to think about how it works in your territory and the assets on which your management is based.

And we talked about our commitment to professionalization understood as quality, projects and results.

Territorio Mudéjar Routes: The beauty of a genuine art form

In 2021, Mudejar architecture celebrates a double anniversary in its declaration as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO: 35 years since the recognition of Mudejar architecture of Teruel in 1986, and 20 years since the extension of the international brand to the entire Aragonese territory, with the incorporation of six buildings from the province of Zaragoza in 2001. This extension was key in order to understand the true dimension and significance of Mudejar art in Aragon.

With this in mind, we have started a series of printed trips, with the help of Prames and the magazine La Magia de Viajar por Aragón (The Magic of travelling in Aragón), in which every two months we will travel around the Mudejar heritage in the province of Zaragoza.

The trips will lead us to the month of December, when we will commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the declaration as World Heritage of some of its most outstanding examples.

The first of the articles, available in the January issue of the magazine La Magia de Viajar (The Magic of Travelling), allows us to explain the beauty of a genuine art form. That is to say, why Mudejar art, exclusive to the Iberian Peninsula and an enclave between Islamic and Christian art derived from the conditions of coexistence in medieval Spain, is the most genuine artistic manifestation of Spain and has its greatest exponent in Aragon, a land of frontiers and a melting pot of cultures.

Read the article.

Territorio Mudéjar, a breeding ground for new professionals in the management of historical-artistic heritage

At Territorio Mudéjar we make the most of our resources to generate professional fields of excellence, in which each area we develop is specialised and works to find solutions of innovative use for the “heritage space” as a space for professional development and learning.

These days we are finalising the different actions that are part of the practical study for the definition of a specialised professional profile for cultural heritage located in rural territories and that in our case coincides with the work that we actively carry out with the localities that hold the UNESCO World Heritage declaration.

This project, funded by the Ministry of Culture and Sport through its 2019 call of grants for projects for the conservation, protection and dissemination of World Heritage Sites, as well as by the Council of Zaragoza through its direct aid to Territorio Mudéjar, aims to make our entity a benchmark in terms of the quality applied to the development of projects linked to management and accessibility strategies, understanding that the quality and achievement of objectives of our projects must begin by strengthening the skills and abilities of the people who work on them on a daily basis.

In this line, we have developed different actions throughout the year 2020 through which we are working on the creation of synergies with entities of recognised prestige in our territory such as the Tarazona Monumental Foundation, the Santa Mª de Albarracín Foundation, the Association of Municipalities of the Camino de Santiago or the Sobrarbe-Pyrenees Geopark, among others.

In addition, we are in continuous contact with national and international entities that work to ensure that professionalization is the key to the future of our heritage as an economic agent and from different points of view, such as Icomos España or Aproha.

The richest and most stimulating actions are found in the incorporation of students, recent graduates and emerging professionals in the different projects that we carry out through the University of Zaragoza, for the Challenge Programme, for entities such as Cepyme that train for professionalization, or through the introduction of students in training period for the development of their Master’s or Bachelor’s Degree Final Project.

For this reason, students of Art History, History and other humanistic fields are training in Territorio Mudéjar to be able to build a learning process that takes into account the contexts: Mudejar art, Aragonese art and the general context, because no art is free of influences.

As an example of some of the initiatives we are working on:

-We have been in San Mateo de Gállego making a technical visit so that Sarai Salvo -student of the #ChallengeProgramme2020- gets to know the town and can start working on her Master’s Degree Final Project on the parish museum of San Mateo de Gállego, using the knowledge learned in the creation of focal points of heritage and cultural action for the town.During the visit we also visited the Mudejar pottery workshop Siglo XXI of Fernando Malo, a ceramics workshop specialising in the reproduction of Mudejar tiles for restorations, which will form an active part of our student’s project.

-We have also done technical visits to Magallón (town council) and Tarazona (Tarazona Monumental Foundation) with Derry Holgado and Alfredo Notivol, as part of the internships they are doing through the programme for recent graduates in the first case and through CEPYME in the second.

-With Derry Holgado we visited the Tarazona Monumental Foundation, the Santa María de Albarracín Foundation, the UNESCO Sobrarbe-Pyrenees World Geopark and the church of San Pablo in Zaragoza, one of the buildings declared UNESCO Mudejar World Heritage.

-Eugenia Gallego, another of our students, is working on her Final Master’s Degree Project on the management plan for towers in Villarreal de Huerva, Mainar and Romanos.

-María Foradada is studying different options within Territorio Mudéjar that allow her to develop her Bachelor’s Degree Final Project and finish her degree studies with a clear focus on Mudejar heritage and its practical application in rural areas.

With this project we contribute to training professionals with specific skills through the real application of the contents of the training programmes, who know how to detect what is essential in order for a project to be carried out and have a chance of success.

Likewise, with this work we are making progress in the project to define a professional profile for the management of historical-artistic heritage located in rural areas, financed by the Ministry of Culture and Sport and by the Council of Zaragoza through its direct aid to our organisation.

International Day of Education: how to introduce the methodology of heritage studies into curricula

Territorio Mudéjar joins the International Day of Education, a celebration proclaimed by UNESCO which this year is dedicated to “Recovering and revitalising education for the COVID-19 generation”

At Territorio Mudéjar we work to link education, heritage and innovation; to introduce the methodology of heritage studies into curricula; to achieve a rural and identity-based rootedness beginning in the classroom; to train university and postgraduate students in methodology and heritage (Challenge Programme); and to create knowledge through our research stays.

We are convinced that everything starts at school and that school is a passport to the future that helps to shape what we will be tomorrow.

In this task, teachers are essential, compasses that activate the magnets of curiosity and knowledge.Our latest initiative “Rural school in motion” is aimed at them.

Students, families, teachers, administrative and service staff and the educational community in general: Happy Education Day!

Territorio Mudéjar will launch a new call for research stays on June 1, with two new features: digital strategy as a vehicle for innovation and the incorporation of the creative field through the modality of “artist residencies”

On June 1, Territorio Mudéjar will open the fourth edition of the “Gonzalo M. Borrás Gualis” Fieldwork Stays and Projects, aimed at directly supporting the work of researchers and project promoters who want to work on the development of the towns based on the responsible and sustainable use of cultural and natural heritage resources.

The call offers advice on possible projects for all those professionals who need guidance regarding what kind of proposals can be submitted.

For this reason, we invite you to the presentation programme, where we will explain the rules for participation and you will get to know the results of the projects and the researchers of the 2021 stays.

Each presentation will include an activity related to the project and the space chosen. We look forward to seeing you!

? The first presentation will take place on Wednesday, June 1, at 18.30 with the collaboration of the Monasterio de las Canonesas del Santo Sepulcro.

There, researchers Myriam Monterde, Elisa Plana, David Guirao and José Manuel Herráiz will explain the project Educational Mudejar: the guide.

The stay has focused on the creation of educational material for primary and secondary school students in order to help them interpret the Mudejar through a combination of illustrations and real images as well as to value its rich legacy.

? On Thursday, June 2, at 18.30 in the parish church of San Félix in Torralba de Ribota, Laura Villacampa, Ignacio Pérez Bailón and Javier Gómez Patrocinio will present the project Preventive Urbanism, a tool to take care of our towns.

This research stay offers an analysis and comparative study of the urban planning regulations governing architectural interventions in various towns in the Mudejar Territory.

? On Friday, June 3, at 18.30 in the church of San Miguel de Daroca, María Amor Borque and Serge Dambrine will present Scenic Mudejar, a challenge.

This study has focused on defining strategies in the territory that promote Mudejar identity and reinforce its professional networks through research, creation and artistic dissemination in the field of musical and performance art. It has also designed actions that will enable the programming of future performing art events in the region.

? On Sunday, June 5, at 11.30 a.m. in the church of La Virgen de Tobed, Chema Agustín will present the project The Mudejar and Euclidean geometry or plane geometry.

This fieldwork stay deals with the plastic study of the Aragonese Mudejar in the area of the Mudejar Territory and, by extension, in the province of Zaragoza. The project has made it possible to collect and study Mudejar layout, studying it in depth and with geometric rigour.

These activities are free of charge and prior registration is recommended until 18.00 the day before the activity takes place, by telephone (+34 876 634 125), Whatsapp (+34 649 799 405) or email (info@territoriomudejar.es)

We will soon give the details of the event and inform you of all the news and we hope you will participate. See you in Territorio Mudéjar!