But this is the Spanish rendition of the story and has its own colour, history and cultural underpinnings. The story’s leading characters are from a distinctly Christian Spanish ancestry, but the Moorish influence is never far away, especially in the final resting place of their mortal remains – a mausoleum in a Christian church, built upon the site of and retaining impressive architectural features of an earlier Moorish building.

The story of Los amantes de Teruel (the Lovers of Teruel) goes something like this: the year is about 1217 and a young man called Juan (also known as Diego) Martínez de Marcilla, from the town of Teruel in Aragon, fell in love with Isabel Segura, the only daughter of Pedro Segura, a very rich man. The young couple declared their love for each other and Juan told Isabel that he wanted to marry her. She said she felt the same way, but knew that it could never happen without her parents’ permission. This only made him want her more. His intentions were good, but he was not rich.

Juan told his true love that he thought her father despised him solely because of his lack of money and asked her to wait five years while he went away to work and seek his fortune. She promised him that she would wait.

During his five years away, Juan earned a great deal of money fighting the Moors on land and at sea.

But during the same period, the girl’s father kept raising with her the question of her marriage. She answered by saying that she wanted to stay a virgin until she was twenty, insisting that women should not marry until they knew how to manage a household. Her loving father indulged her by granting her wish.

However, once the five years were up, the father told his daughter that he now wanted her to marry. She knew that her requested five-year delay was over and she had heard nothing from her loved one, and so she agreed to her father’s request. Her father quickly made a match and the wedding was celebrated. It was then, of course, that Juan returned!

Although she was now married to another man, Juan made his way to Isabel’s bedside, where he knelt and said: “Kiss me or I will die”. Good Christian that she was, Isabel refused, saying, “God does not wish me to betray my husband. For the love of Jesus Christ, I beg you to find another and forget about me. If you cannot please God, then you cannot please me”. Juan repeated his plea, but still she refused, so he did indeed fall down dead, just as he’d said.

By the light of the moon, Isabel could see that Juan had dropped to his death and she began to tremble. She woke her husband, saying that his snoring was so loud it had frightened her. She asked him to tell her something to comfort her. He told her a joke and she asked for another. Then she told him what had happened and how Juan had died so suddenly.

Her husband’s first reaction was sympathy for Juan: “Oh, you mean and wicked woman! Why did you refuse to kiss him?” She retorted that she did not want to betray her husband, and he accepted her reasoning, but was very perturbed and didn’t know quite what to make of things. “If people know that he died here, they will say that I killed him and that will put me in a very difficult position”.

Eventually, they resolved to take him to her father’s house and, though it was a difficult task, they managed to get him there without anyone hearing them.

The young woman then started to reflect on how much Juan had loved her and all he had done for her and that he had died because she would not kiss him. She decided to go and kiss him before he was buried so she went to the Church of San Pedro to find him. The good ladies of the town stood up as she entered the Church, but all that Isabel cared about was finding Juan’s dead body. She removed the shroud that covered his face and she kissed him so hard that she herself died!

The people who witnessed the kiss were going to tell her to leave the church when they realised she was dead. The husband had followed her to the church and told everyone there exactly what had happened, so the townsfolk decided to bury the couple together in the same grave.

So, that is how it was that the ill-fated lovers became known as the Lovers of Teruel. However, remains were not discovered until 1555 while work was being carried out on the Church of San Pedro. Years later, in 1619, the secretary of the Teruel Town Council, Juan Yagüe de Salas, claimed to have found a document entitled The story of the Teruel Lovers which confirmed the identity of the bodies and the events that took place in the town at the beginning of the 13th century.

Their tombs lie side by side and can still be seen in the Church of San Pedro today. They are carved out of marble and bear the family shields of Marcilla and Segura. The lids are exquisitely carved: one features the strong and handsome Juan, his one arm outstretched, reaching for his love Isabel – his hand comes close to touching her, but religious piety forbids their actually touching since she was married to another man.