Exploring the wonders of Roman Spain

On By Guy PelhamIn Great places to visit in Spain

The Romans were top dogs in Spain for around 600 years. And they certainly left their mark during that time. Theatres, amphitheatres, aqueducts, lighthouses, circuses, Roman roads and baths, temples – they’re all still here (more or less!) 2,000 years later.

Four Spanish cities – Mérida, Tarragona, Lugo and Segovia – are UNESCO World Heritage sites, mostly because of what the Romans left behind. So there’s a lot to see. The downside is that you have to do a lot of kilometres to get round them all!

Temple of Diana, Mérida in Extremadura. Built in the 1st century AD in Mérida’s Roman forum. Though historians think it was probably dedicated to the Emperor Augustus, not Diana.

Here are the best bits of Roman Spain (aka Hispania) we’ve visited, plus quite a few more that we still need to see. Tap on the list below to jump straight to a destination. To jump to a map, tap here.

Segovia

Segovia may not boast the most comprehensive Roman remains in Spain. But it is my favourite Roman city!

Its astonishing aqueduct marches uncompromisingly right through the middle of town. You run out of superlatives just gazing up at it.

The aqueduct brought water from the Fuenfria spring, about 17 kilometres outside Segovia

And here’s the astonishing thing – no mortar was used in its construction. Those huge granite blocks stay in place because of the skill of the Roman masons.

And here’s another thing. The aqueduct was still supplying water to Segovia right up till 1973. OK, so it’s had plenty of care and maintenance over the centuries. But I’m from the UK, where our water pipes don’t seem to last 20 years, never mind 2,000!

The Segovia aqueduct has a total of 167 arches. Built in the 2nd century AD, probably in the reign of the Emperor Trajan.
These huge blocks of stone are not held together by mortar at all – just the skilful way the stones were cut, plus the force of gravity. It’s worked pretty well for nigh on 2,000 years!

Coca and the Emperor

Try a cool side-trip to the little village of Coca, 45 minutes north of Segovia. Not only does it have one of the most impressive castles (not Roman, I’m afraid!) in Spain, but it was the birthplace of the Emperor Teodosio.

The future Emperor Teodosio was born here in Coca in 347 AD

He was the last emperor to rule over the united Roman Empire, before it split into the western half (based in Rome), and the eastern half, (based in Byzantium, the modern-day Istanbul).

Mérida

Mérida, in Extremadura near the Portuguese border, is the absolute must-see city for anyone wanting to know more about the Roman Empire in Spain. Some say its Roman remains are the best anywhere outside Italy.

The Romans called the place Augusta Emerita, which got shortened to Mérida at some point over the past 2,000 years.

Mérida’s Roman theatre is astonishing, the most complete anywhere in Spain. And in most of Europe too for that matter.
Seating in the Roman theatre of Mérida, which still stages productions today.

Capital of Lusitania

The city was the capital of Lusitania, the westernmost province of the Empire, and was founded in 25 BCE by the Emperor Augustus (which is where the Augusta bit of the city name came from).

The Romans had a very effective way of extending their empire into hostile territory. They granted plots of land to veterans of the legions who’d done 25 years in the army. That’s where the Emerita bit of the city name came from; these guys had earned their land through merit.

So the countryside around a city like Mérida would have been populated by a bunch of battle-hardened ex-legionaries, who wouldn’t stand any nonsense from the local tribes. Just the kind of guys you needed to protect the capital of Lusitania if things got sticky.

The remarkable Roman bridge of Mérida, still sturdy after almost 2,000 years. It stayed open to traffic as recently as 1991. It boasts 60 arches spanning almost 800 metres across the Rio Guadiana.
Bridges old and new. The Roman bridge, with the 20th century Puente Lusitania in the background, designed by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava.
The towering colums of the Acueducto de los Milagros (the Miracle Aqueduct). You can see why it got the name – it must have seemed utterly miraculous to people back in the first century AD, when it was built.
More than 800 metres of the Milagros aqueduct is still standing. It carried water from the Proserpina dam about 5km outside the city.
The chunkier Acueducto de San Lazaro, not quite so elegant, but one of three aqueducts that supplied the Roman city, fed by underground channels.
You won’t find a better Roman museum than this. Outside Italy anyway. The magnificent Museo Nacional de Arte Romano.
One of the beautifully preserved mosaics in the Museo Nacional de Arte Romano in Merida
A head of Augustus, the Emperor who founded the city of Mérida
The Circo Romano, used for Ben Hur-style chariot races. Modelled on the Circus Maximus in Rome itself, it’s one of the best-preserved examples anywhere in the Roman Empire.

Puente de Alcántara, Extremadura

If you needed more proof that the Romans were great engineers, look no further than the Puente de Alcántara, just under 2 hours drive north of Mérida. It spans the Rio Tajo (the Tagus), the longest river in the whole of Hispania. Built in the first century AD, probably in the reign of the Emperor Trajan, it has a triumphal arch in the middle.

In the little Roman temple beside the bridge is the line “Pontem perpetui masurum in secula mundi ” (rough translation; this bridge will endure as long as the world lasts). It’s doing OK so far!!

Just upstream is the huge 20th century Alcántara dam.

Tarragona (and a bit of Barcelona)

From the far west of Spain, let’s cross to the Mediterranean coast, and another Roman capital city.

Tarragona (Tarraco to the Romans) was a seriously important place. The Emperor Augustus created the province of Tarraconensis in 27 BCE, which took in a huge chunk of Roman Spain (see map below), with Tarraco as its capital.

From 27 to 25 BCE, Augustus himself actually lived here. For the first time, he ruled the Empire from outside Rome itself, while he organised military campaigns against Hispania’s stroppy tribes.

The Roman amphiteatre of Tarragona
Part of the Circo Romano – much of the rest is concealed under nearby housing
Remains of the Roman forum
The Roman Empire in Spain in the first century AD. Tarraconense was by far the biggest Roman province, and Tarragona was its capital. Source: Wikimedia Commons

For more, check out the National Archaeological Museum of Tarragona (MNAT) here. 

Barcelona

You don’t hear much about the Roman origins of Barcelona, just an hour or so up the coast The city has a few other claims to fame! But the Romans knew it as Barcino.

OK, so it wasn’t as important as Tarragona. In fact to begin with, it wasn’t even as important as Badalona, which is now just a dormitory town just outside the modern city of Barcelona.

But Barcino grew in importance and by the 3rd century AD, it was doing pretty well, largely because its walls made it more defensible than Tarraco.

Head underground to see the remains of Roman Barcelona

You can stroll through the remains of the Roman town on a very cool underground walkway. Head for the MUHBA, the archaeological museum in Plaça del Rei.

Empúries

Empúries is about 90 minutes drive north of Barcelona, up near the French border.

The locals there made the smart move of aligning themselves with the Romans during the Punic Wars against Carthage. After the Roman victory, Empúries was used by the Roman armies as their base for the conquest of the rest of Hispania. We’ve yet to visit.

The Roman ruins of Empúries, built on the remains of the earlier Greek town. Photo credit: LeZibou

Zaragoza

One of the key Roman cities in Tarraconensis was Zaragoza, about 2.5 hours drive west of Tarragona, also founded by the Emperor Augustus. He really was a busy guy in this part of the world.

The place is named after him – Caesar Augusta. The name evolved into Zaragoza after 2,000 years of mispronunciation!

The Roman theatre of Zaragoza. It could seat 6,000 spectators, and was only re-discovered in 1972. Nobody knew it was there, until road works in Calle Verónica found it by accident!
It all began with this guy, the Emperor Augustus. The town he founded in 14 BCE was named after him.
Ruins of the Roman wall of Zaragoza, off the Plaza del Pilar

For more, head for the huge central square of Zaragoza, dominated by the Basilica de Nuestra Señora del Pilar, and take in the Museo del Foro Romano. The Teatro Romano has a museum on site too.

Let’s head south!

The next Roman capital on our list is Cartagena, in Murcia province. It’s several hours drive down the Mediterranean coast though. So here are some cool Roman sites to see on your way south, just in case you were getting Roman withdrawal symptoms; Sagunto, Valencia, Villajoyosa and Lucentum.

Saguntum

This is another place we’ve yet to visit. The city – today’s Sagunto – played a key role in the wars between Carthage and Rome. Hannibal’s decision to besiege the pro-Roman town of Saguntum in 219 BCE triggered the Second Punic War, the one where Hannibal marched his elephants over the Alps and into Italy itself.

Sagunto’s heavily restored Roman theatre. Photo credit: Pieter van Everdingen via Creative Commons

Hannibal lost the war in the end, despite battling his way vainly all over the Italian peninsula. Rome retook Saguntum seven years later. It flourished under the Empire, with an estimated population of 50,000.

Valencia

The Romans knew the city as Valentia and there’s a cool underground walkway which takes you through the remains of the Roman town. Head for the Centro Arqueológico de l’Almoina.

The walkway is actually under this pool outside the Centro Arqueológico!

The town had a bit of a chequered history under the Roman Empire. The first version of Valentia was founded by Roman military veterans, but it only lasted 63 years before Pompey the Great destroyed the place in 75 BCE in the Sertorian civil wars. The place was deserted for 50 years afterwards until it was re-founded in the reign of the Emperor Augustus (him again!).

Villajoyosa

This gets included partly because it’s our town! But the Romans were here in force too; they called the place Allon. Although perhaps its most famous piece of Roman heritage isn’t actually in the town at all – it’s under water about one kilometre off La Vila’s port.

It’s a 1st century Roman ship, wrecked off the coast and preserved in the silts of the sea bed for almost 2,000 years. It’s one of the most important find of its type in the entire Mediterranean. Check out a video of the wreck here and here.

Much of its cargo of amphorae of lead ingots, oil, wine and fish sauce has been lifted out of the wreck and is undergoing restoration at La Vila’s excellent small museum. I’d really recommend a guided tour.

Some of the hundreds of amphorae salvaged from the wreck. The ship is named Bou Ferrer after the two local divers who discovered it.
How the Bou Ferrer might have looked.

The town also has a Roman baths, first unearthed in 2008 and now being turned into a walk-through visitor centre. More on La Vila’s Roman past in my post here.

Roman baths in La Vila. Pic Vilamuseu via Creative Commons
A huge steel structure now covers the site to make it weatherproof. The next stage is to uncover the remains of the baths below all the construction material and open it to the public.

Lucentum

Just a half hour down the road lies Lucentum, the Roman town of Alicante, a few kilometres to the north of the modern-day city.

Its survival is a kind of miracle. Developers wanted to bulldoze the entire site during the boom construction years of the 1960s.

But a remarkable campaign led by Solveig Nordström, an indomitable Swedish archaeologist who physically laid down in front of the bulldozers, meant the site survived and is still being excavated today. The tours are excellent. For more, check out my post here.

Cartagena

Just an hour or two south of Lucentum lies Cartagena, yet another Roman provincial capital, originally founded by Rome’s arch-enemy Carthage.

After Carthage was comprehensively defeated in the Punic Wars, the Romans took control of the Iberian peninsula, and named the city Cartago Nova (New Carthage).

It has an impressive collection of Roman antiquities scattered across the city centre. The big one is the Roman theatre.

Astonishingly, no-one knew it was there for more than 1,500 years. The invading Moors built their fishing quarter on top of it. Generations of people lived on the site after that. Part of it was covered by the city’s old cathedral. The theatre only really re-emerged after a dig lasting from 1996-2003.

You can also walk through the remains of the Roman Forum (head for the excellent Museo del Foro Romano) and get a taste of how life might have been for a middle-class Roman family in the nearby Casa de la Fortuna.

Walk around the Forum of Cartagena in the Museo del Foro
The symbol of the Casa de la Fortuna
How the street outside might have looked 2,000 years ago. The front door of the Casa de la Fortuna is on the right
How the triclinium (dining room) may have looked in the Casa de la Fortuna
By the 3rd century AD, the map of Roman Spain had changed. In 298 AD, the Emperor Diocletian created a new province of Cartaginensis, with its capital in Cartagena.

For more on Cartagena, check out my post here.

Segóbriga

Segobriga is a ruined Roman town more or less in the middle of nowhere, set in rolling countryside just over an hour’s drive south east of Madrid. It features a pretty impressive theatre and amphiteatre, plus the remains of a Roman baths complex.

View from the stage wings of the Roman theatre
A recreation of how the basilica might have looked in the forum of Segóbriga

The basis of Segobriga’s economy seems to have been mining. They dug out a kind of semi-transparent gypsum that could be used as glass substitute for windows.

Segóbriga became a municipium – officially a Roman town – during the reign of the Emperor Augustus, so it was a fairly important place.

The amphiteatre of Segóbriga could seat 5,500 spectators
A gladiator’s eye view inside the amphitheatre of Segóbriga!
Segóbriga was the centre for mining lapis specularis, a kind of translucent gypsum used for window making.

Segóbriga has a small museum displaying some of the best finds from the site.

An hour’s drive away is Villa Romana de Noheda, near Cuenca. It’s another place we haven’t been to yet. But it boasts the biggest Roman mosaic in the world, an impressive 230 square metres. So it’s another one for the must-do list.

The mosaic. Photo credit via Wikimedia Commons here.

Northern Spain

The north is another part of Roman Spain where we still have plenty to do. First on our list is Las Médulas, a spectacular landscape created entirely by the Roman search for gold.

The Roman mines of Las Médulas

Las Médulas is a UNESCO World Heritage Site near Ponferrada in Castilla y Leon, an entirely man-made landscape created by Roman engineers.

They didn’t dig conventional gold mines here. Instead, they used the power of water to shatter the rock which contained the precious ore.

Las Médulas. Photo credit: Rafael Ibáñez Fernández via Wikimedia Commons

How the Romans did this is as remarkable as the landscape itself. First, they honeycombed the mountainside with galleries tunnelled into the rock. They then brought water via aqueducts and channels over great distances and stored it in huge lakes at the site.

Once a lake was full, the sluice gates were opened and water flowed with irresistible force into the rock galleries. The massive water pressure caused the whole mountainside to collapse. The workforce – mostly slaves, of course – then sieved through the debris to extract the gold. The process was then repeated time and again over a huge area.

This video explains better than I can just how it was done.

Full disclosure – we haven’t been here yet, but it’s top of our Roman to-do list. Take a look at this guide instead and I’ll update this post when we’ve visited.

Visits to the site were badly hit by forest fires last year (2025); hopefully there won’t be a repeat any time soon.

Roman city walls of Lugo

The city of Lugo, 90 minutes drive west of Las Médulas, boasts the most complete Roman walls remaining anywhere in Europe.

The Roman walls of Lugo. Photo credit: Simon Burchell via Wikimedia Commons

The Romans knew Lugo as Lucus Augusti (named for the ubiquitous Emperor Augustus). The walls were built between 263 and 276 A.D. to defend the city against local tribesmen and Germanic invaders.

Again, this is a site we haven’t yet visited, so no more details as yet!

Roman lighthouse, A Coruña

Finally, a Roman site in Northern Spain we have visited! A Coruña lighthouse, aka la Torre de Hercules, is the oldest remaining Roman lighthouse in the world. And it’s still working! It’s yet another UNESCO World Heritage site.

OK, so it didn’t look quite like this when the Romans built it, probably in the 1st century. It had a facelift in the 18th century, which gave it a different facade, but a lot of the interior is Roman.

Credit: via Creative Commons CC BY-SA 3.0

According to legend, Hercules defeated a giant here after an epic battle, which is why the tower is named after him. Hercules then buried his enemy’s head on the site and ordered a city to be built. Apparently that was the kind of thing the gods did back then.

You can climb the 200 steps to the top – info here.

Andalucía & southern Spain

We missed out on some key Roman sites the last time we were down in the south of Spain. But there’s plenty to go at. Let’s start with one place we have visited:

Málaga

It’s a fair bet that most of the millions who flood through Málaga airport every year are heading for the beaches of the Costa del Sol, rather than the city itself.

But Málaga is well worth the detour. The city has a Roman theatre right in its centre, which laid undiscovered for centuries before being unearthed in the 1950s.

The Roman theatre of Málaga with the walls of the Moorish Alcázar up above.

Up above, on the crest of the Monte Gibralfaro is the Moorish castle, the Alcázar. The Moors pinched many of the bricks and pillars from the Roman theatre to build it.

Check out this guide for other Roman remains around Málaga – it’s in Spanish, but hit Google Translate and you’ll be fine.

Córdoba

I’m guessing most visitors to Córdoba are there to see the amazing Moorish Mezquita – but there’s evidence of the city’s Roman heritage too.

Founded by the Roman general Claudius Marcellus in the 2nd century BCE, Corduba was the capital of the province of Hispania Ulterior, created under the Roman republic. The city chose the wrong side in the civil war between Pompey and Julius Caesar, (49-45 BCE) and had a hard time for a while afterwards.

Roman temple, Córdoba. Photo credit: Alessandro Bonvini, via Wikimedia Commons.
Roman bridge across the Guadalquivir river, Córdoba. Photo credit: Kent Wang via Creative Commons

Augustus granted Corduba the high status of Colonia Patricia and – just as he did at Mérida – used it as a place to settle more veterans of his legions.

Fascinating fact!

Not far from Cordoba, archaeologists have found what they think might be the remains of one of Hannbal’s elephants. It may have died as Hannibal marched his army up through Spain and into Italy to take on the might of the Roman empire on its own doorstep. See the full story here.

Italica (near Sevilla)

Italica’s main claim to fame is that two emperors came from here – Hadrian (the one who built the wall across the top of England) and Trajan.

Just outside the modern-day Sevilla, near the town of Santiponce, it also boasts one of the largest amphitheatres anywhere in the Empire. It could seat 25,000 spectators back in the day.

The Roman amphitheatre at Italica, one of the largest in the Roman Empire. Photo credit: Yvonne Body

Founded in 206 BCE by the great Roman general Scipio Africanus (the guy who really defeated Hannibal and his elephants), it was the first Roman city in Spain. Like quite a few other places in Hispania, it started life as a colonia for discharged army veterans.

Its modern-day claim to fame is a role in Game of Thrones. I’m told the amphitheatre featured in the seventh and eighth seasons as the Dragonpit of King’s Landing (Game of Thrones isn’t my thing, so I’m relying here on what proper fans of the series say).

Baelo Claudia

A prosperous Roman town founded in the second century BCE near the modern town of Tarifa (windsurfing capital of Spain).

The city specialised in supplying garum, a uniquely Roman sauce made from fermented fish guts. It apparently stank exactly as you’d imagine fish guts would stink, but the Romans couldn’t get enough of the stuff and there was a flourishing garum trade between Spain and Italy.

Ruins of the Roman city of Baelo Claudia near Tarifa. Photo credit via Wikimedia Commmons here

Baelo Claudia was probably hit by an earthquake in the second century AD, and also suffered from pirate attacks.

Top sites in Roman Spain

This isn’t quite an exhaustive list, as Google only lets you put ten locations on one map.. But these are ten of the best!

More on Roman Spain here:

© Guy Pelham

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