Few Spanish cities stack their layers so visibly: an Augustan colony founded in 14 BC, a Taifa palace of the Banu Hud, a Christian cathedral built on the mosque, and streets shelled through two Napoleonic sieges. Three days follows that sequence.
Underground museum beneath Plaza de la Seo showing the forum of Caesaraugusta, founded 14 BC by Augustus for veterans of the Cantabrian Wars: market shops, a cloaca sewer and the river-port canal. Tue–Sat 10:00–14:00 and 17:00–21:00.
The 1st-century AD Roman theatre, seating some 6,000 and one of the largest in Hispania, rediscovered in 1972 during building works on Calle Verónica. A roofed walkway lets you look down into the cavea and orchestra.
The 11th-century pleasure palace of the Banu Hud Taifa kings, the only substantial Islamic palace of Al-Andalus's Taifa period to survive. Later a Christian royal palace of the Crown of Aragon, an Inquisition seat, and now the Aragonese parliament.
Built directly over the Great Mosque, itself over the Roman forum temple. Romanesque apses, a Mudéjar brick and glazed-tile exterior wall, and the Museo de Tapices with the world's most complete collection of Gothic-Flemish tapestries.
Built for the 1908 Hispano-French Exhibition marking the siege centenary. Archaeology on the ground floor, and upstairs one of Spain's key Goya holdings, including his portraits of Charles IV and María Luisa and the Ferdinand VII equestrian.
The 1795 neoclassical city gate left pockmarked with French artillery and musket damage from the sieges of 1808–09, when roughly 50,000 people died. It was the site of the fiercest fighting on 4 August 1808 and is kept unrestored as a war memorial.
In the 16th-century Renaissance Palacio de los Pardo, this museum traces Francisco de Goya, born 1746 in nearby Fuendetodos. Complete original print series: Caprichos, Desastres de la Guerra, Tauromaquia and Disparates.
The surviving tower of the Muslim governors' palace, later a royal residence of the Aragonese kings, standing on the line of the 3rd-century Roman wall. A preserved stretch of that wall with a Caesar Augustus statue runs beside it on Avenida César Augusto.
Two small sites minutes apart: the public latrines and porticoed swimming pool of the Roman baths on Calle San Juan y San Pedro, and the river-port exchange building on Plaza San Bruno, where Ebro barge cargo was unloaded into the forum.
A UNESCO-listed Mudéjar church of the 13th–14th centuries with an octagonal brick tower raised on an earlier minaret. Inside is Damián Forment's 1511–1517 carved altarpiece. Long the parish of the working-class Barrio de San Pablo.
A 1570s Aragonese Renaissance palace with a two-storey patio, on the axis of Calle Alfonso I — cut through the medieval fabric in 1866 to frame the Pilar. The route passes the Renaissance patios of Casa Morlanes and the Lonja merchants' exchange.
The stone bridge, begun 1401 and finished 1440, was for centuries the only Ebro crossing here; it was repeatedly rebuilt after floods and mined during the 1808 sieges. Its four bronze lions date from 1991.