Roman Walls of Barcino (first-phase circuit)
About
Barcino's first wall was a mark of civic status for a brand-new Augustan colony, not a defense against any real threat — a modest stone ring about 9 meters high and 2-3.5 meters thick, dated to the colony's founding around 15-10 BCE. The much heavier, tower-studded circuit visitors associate with Roman Barcelona today is a late-3rd/early-4th-century response to Frankish and Alemannic raids, more than a century after this snapshot — only the earlier, plainer wall stood in 117 CE.
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 →