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The Roman Walls of Tarragona
About
Roman troops began raising these fortifications in the late 3rd century BCE, making them the oldest Roman walls standing anywhere outside Italy. The 3,500-meter circuit sat on megalithic Iberian foundations dressed with massive, irregular stone blocks, including the Tower of Minerva, home to the oldest Roman inscription found anywhere on the Iberian peninsula. Roughly 1,100 meters survive today along the Passeig Arqueològic. By 117 CE these walls had already guarded the provincial capital for more than three centuries.
What happened here
A town wall is a claim as much as a defence. It is faced in stone, cored with rubble and concrete, and pierced by gates that are more decorated than the rest of it put together. Towers project so that anyone at the base can be shot from the side. In most of the empire in this century the walls are old, unmanned, and half built over — shops lean against them and houses are cut into them — because the frontier is a long way off and the danger is not here. On the frontier itself a wall is something else entirely: a continuous barrier with ditches, gates at intervals, patrol tracks and manned turrets, built to control movement rather than to stop an army.
Sources
Nearby
Roman Maps shows the empire frozen at 11 August 117 CE, the day Trajan died — its moment of greatest territorial extent. Explore the full map →