Tarragona is just 5 minutes up the road from PortAdventura.
From ChatGPT: “Tarragona (ancient Tarraco) is generally considered the oldest lasting Roman settlement in Spain. It was founded around 218 BCE during the Second Punic War, when Roman forces under Gnaeus Scipio established a base there after landing to fight Carthage.”
Wow! That’s some serious history. We spent the day walking the city. First stop, the Tarraco Colesseum.
The Colosseum
This Colosseum has a great history about it. It started out as the standard Roman entertainment arena, but eventually changed form several times. For a long time it housed churches in the arena floor. It even became a prison at one point, and even a convent for monks of some sort before it was reclaimed as a history site and the conservation process began.
Here you can see the cross outline of the church at once stood there. This colosseum was abandoned when the city of Tarraco itself was abandoned after the Visigoths took over. The Romans in Tarraco moved out of the city and it became a ghost town (my understanding anyways). A small chapel was installed in the colosseum at some point.
It’s actually a thing in Europe to let ancient ruins be overgrown with vines/etc (bio-matter). The locals love it. I can imagine the feel of being surrounded by the result of the hard labor of millions and millions of man hours of work (probably mostly slave labor). Then watch the vines grow into a living reflection of the cycle of human life over many hundreds of years.
The city was eventually repopulated after the Visigoths, and the chapel was converted to a full church (visible above). This lasted for a time, and then I think it was converted to a convent, and then a prison. The amount of backfill into the colloseum was pretty staggering. They kept building on top of each prior building (a very European thing). When they started to reveal the colloseum again they had to remove A LOT of dirt to get to the original arena floor. I guess if you were to fill in a wheelbarrow full of dirt everyday, then over 2000 years you’d end up filling the entire structure…
The Walk Continues
Here’s a map of ancient Tarraco. You can see the colloseum highlighted to the right. Eventually Barcelona became the preferred Spanish Roman settlement because it was more easily defensible.
