Tarraco was Rome's first city outside Italy and the capital of Hispania Citerior, and Tarragona still lives inside it — a cathedral on a temple podium, flats above a forum, a fishing quarter on an imperial port. Three days of layers, from Scipio to 1811.
Spain's oldest archaeological museum reopened in 2025 after a long refit, showing the Medusa mosaic, imperial statuary from the provincial forum and the bronze tablet recording Tarraco's priesthood law. Tue–Sat 09:30–18:00.
The working-class counterpart to the provincial forum, excavated two metres below street level between apartment blocks: basilica columns, curia foundations and a paved road that the citizens of the Roman colony used daily.
Begun in 1171 on the podium of the Temple of Augustus, whose colossal marble head surfaced under the choir in 2015. Romanesque apse, Gothic nave, a cloister with the carved rat-funeral frieze and a Diocesan Museum of Roman spolia.
Tarragona's Jewish quarter ran along Carrer de Talavera until the pogroms of 1391 and the 1492 expulsion. Hebrew inscriptions reused as building stone survive on nearby facades, and a plaque marks the site of the vanished synagogue.
A 15th-century Gothic merchant's house rebuilt as a Baroque palace by the Castellarnau family, with a frescoed 1764 salon, a courtyard staircase and period furniture. Charles IV and Isabel II both slept here on royal visits.
Julio Antonio and Josep Llimona's 1911 bronze commemorates the sack of Tarragona on 28 June 1811, when Marshal Suchet's French troops stormed the walls and killed thousands of defenders and civilians in a single afternoon.
The modern art museum fills three knocked-through medieval houses on Carrer Santa Anna, holding Julio Antonio's sculpture, work by Salvador Juanpere and the tapestries Joan Miró designed for the city. Closed Mondays.
A 1735 artillery fort above Platja del Miracle, built to cover the harbour after the War of the Spanish Succession and shelled again during the Napoleonic siege. Its ramparts rest directly on Roman quarry cuts in the cliff.
The Ferreres aqueduct carried water some 15 km from the Francolí to Tarraco on two tiers of arches, 217 m long and 27 m high, built under Augustus. You can walk the specus channel across the top through a wooded park.
One of the largest early Christian burial grounds in the western Roman world, over 2,000 graves uncovered in 1923 during construction of a tobacco factory. Sarcophagi, mosaics and the cult of bishop Fructuosus, burnt alive in 259 CE.
A senatorial seaside villa with private baths, painted rooms and a terrace above the beach, occupied from the 1st to the 6th century and burnt in a 3rd-century raid. Trains from Tarragona reach Altafulla in about ten minutes.
The fishermen's quarter grew after the port expansion of the 1790s. The auction hall still sells the afternoon catch around 17:00, and the Port Museum beside it traces the harbour from Roman amphorae to steam cranes.