The rock has drawn people since the deepest past. Cave paintings and Bronze Age graves in the surrounding hills mark habitation from the earliest times, and the town's very name descends from the Arabic Maurela. One after another, the powers of the western Mediterranean took the fortified summit and held it, each leaving the hill a little more layered than they found it. To climb Morella's streets today - up from the gates, past the church, toward the castle on its crown - is to climb through those centuries stacked one directly atop the next.

A fortress this commanding was fought over again and again. Morella saw fierce combat in the War of the Spanish Succession, in the Napoleonic Wars, in the 19th-century Carlist Wars, and once more in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s. In 1938 Franco's forces seized the town - but the fighting did not truly end there. Republican guerrillas held out in the surrounding mountains for nearly two more decades, still active as late as 1956, long after the war was officially declared over. The hill that made Morella worth taking also made it stubbornly hard to fully subdue.

Peace brought a quieter kind of loss. Through Franco's long dictatorship, from 1939 to 1975, Morella's people drained away toward the cities in search of work, and the population fell sharply. Only with the return of democracy did the town begin to recover. Today tourism is its main livelihood, drawing visitors up the N-232 from the coast to walk the walls and the castle, and Morella has been quietly building a case for UNESCO World Heritage status - hoping to see its long, embattled survival formally set down and protected.

For its size, Morella is astonishingly rich in monuments. In the Convent de Sant Francesc, a Gothic fresco known as the Dansa de la Mort - the Dance of Death - still spreads across a wall, its grim procession a medieval reminder that rank and riches end the same way for everyone. The great church of Santa María la Mayor rises near the heart of the town. And on the outskirts, the tall arches of the Santa Llúcia aqueduct stride across a ravine, carrying water toward the walled streets as they have for centuries.

Morella has always made things. The town has herded sheep since at least the 13th century, and though the mills have long gone quiet, its distinctive striped woolen blankets are still sold through the streets, alongside knitwear made the old way. The mountains give up other treasures too: black truffles, in season from February into early March, and honey from the high meadows. Sit down to eat and you may be handed a flaó - the local pastry of cinnamon, cheese, and almonds, a small, sweet summary of a town that has always lived off its hills.