Approximately 5 kilometers from La Fresneda, the remains of the Sanctuary of the Virgin of Gracia are preserved. Its origin is related to the appearance of the Virgin to a shepherd girl from Valjunquera.
At first a modest hermitage was built in the concavity of a cave, and around 1580, La Fresneda donated the land and the hermitage to the religious order of the Minims of San Francisco de Paula. In 1795 the current sanctuary was built with a large church to house the original chapel.
This is a group of buildings from the 16th century. XVIII, some of which are excavated in the rock. Currently, the volumes of the church and the inn stand out, since the rest of the buildings have practically disappeared due to the great deterioration that the complex has suffered.
Of the inn, with a rectangular floor plan, four floors and great constructive sobriety, barely the perimeter walls are preserved, as is the church, from whose study it can be deduced that it was a building with three naves and a straight head, partially sheltered under the rock wall, behind which the Camarín de la Virgen developed.
The fabric of the inn is made of stone while that of the church is made of masonry, reserving the stonework, in the latter, only for the façade, in a classicist style, structured in two bodies, the lower one with three vertical streets of which The central one stands out, flanked by columns of Ionic order, in which the access door opens and the upper part of a street in which a niche opens with a bulk image of the Virgin of Grace flanked by Corinthian columns; The transition between the two is made through an entablature decorated with moldings, finishing off the façade with a triangular pediment.
The only thing known about the interior is that it was decorated in a classicist baroque style since the covers and interior supports have not been preserved.
The habitability difficulties that the original hermitage presented led the friars to found a convent within the town
The town of La Fresneda preserves the tradition of organizing the pilgrimage on the first weekend of May to the Convent, or Sanctuary of the Virgin of Gracia de la Cueva or, also called, the La Fresneda Desert.
On December 26, 2001, the so-called Sanctuary of the Virgin of Gracia in La Fresneda (Teruel) was declared an Asset of Cultural Interest, in the category of Monument.
