Zaragoza’s Story in 10 Buildings: 2,000 Years of History

Zaragoza wears its history – over two thousand years of it – out in the open, if you know where to look. And yet Spain’s fifth biggest city is so often skipped by visitors. This is a shame, but it gives it an authentic atmosphere, with many of its cultural highlights often relatively quiet.

On the main square alone, you can see Roman foundations, a Muslim tower, a Mudéjar cathedral, a Baroque basilica the size of an entire village. Layer after layer, empire after empire – conflict, trauma, wealth and reinvention, all compressed into a compact, walkable old town.

Here’s the story of Zaragoza, told through its buildings and monuments.

Caesaraugusta – Zaragoza’s Roman Origins

Although Iberians had lived on the land that is now Zaragoza for centuries, the city’s real development began when a Roman colony was founded here around 14BC by Emperor Augustus. It was originally founded as a home for veterans from the Cantabrian Wars – the wars by which the Romans finally conquered all of Hispania.

Over time it became a major Roman outpost, in part because of the River Ebro, which made it an important trading centre. People moved to the city from all over the region in search of wealth.

The best place to see just how important Roman Zaragoza was is the Caesaraugusta Theatre. Only the bottom tier remains now, but once this theatre seated around 6,000 spectators.

Alongside the theatre, there are several other sites to discover Zaragoza’s Roman heritage – I go over each of them in my full Zaragoza travel guide. But perhaps the most obvious legacy is the city’s name.

Known as ‘Caesaraugusta’, the city was the only Roman city to bear the full name of its founder, Caesar Augustus. Over many centuries, this name was corrupted by many tongues, eventually morphing into the name it has today: Zaragoza.

The theatre fell into disuse in the third century as the Roman Empire fell into crisis. It was gradually buried under medieval housing, and wasn’t rediscovered until excavations in 1972.

The city itself was eventually conquered by the Visigoths in the 5th century, who ruled the city for over 200 years, but didn’t leave any real visible trace on the city. Their successors, however, left many…

Islamic Zaragoza – the Torreón de la Zuda

In the early 8th century, Spain was conquered by Muslim forces, ushering in several centuries of Islamic rule. The political heart of Islamic Spain was Cordoba in the South, but Zaragoza – then known as Saraqusta – was to become one of Al-Andalus’ most important cities.

In the Plaza del Pilar, Zaragoza’s main square, you’ll find one very clear reminder of this time: the Torreón de la Zuda. This sturdy-looking tower, rising from the remains of the Roman walls, was the keep of a much larger fortified palace.

The Palace that once stood on this site was the seat of the Muslim governors, built into the northwest corner of the old Roman defences.

The Tower is the only part that remains. And even this isn’t the original: What we see today dates largely from a later rebuilding. It now operates as a tourist office, and you can climb to the top floor for panoramic views for free.

The Aljafería Palace – A Jewel of Islamic Spain

After several centuries of being ruled from Córdoba, Muslim Spain began to fracture, and broke up into several smaller kingdoms.

One of the most powerful of these was the Taifa of Zaragoza. At its peak, the city was a centre of culture, art and science. This era is reflected in one of the city’s most magnificent buildings: the Aljafería Palace.

The Palace is a fair way out of the historic centre, built as a pleasure palace for the taifa kings. It’s an astonishing survival, with remarkable artistic ambition on display in a small but stunning private mosque, and an ancient patio surrounded by horsehoe arches, delicate stucco work and engraved calligraphy.

But the Aljafería also tells the story of what came next. In the 12th century, Zaragoza was conquered by Alfonso I ‘the Battler’ and, once again, became Christian.

The Palace became the seat of power for the new rulers of Aragon, who later added their own lavish Gothic apartments upstairs.

Even now it’s at the heart of life in the region: it’s home to the Aragonese regional parliament.

La Seo – A Mudéjar City

As Muslim Spain fell to the Christian Reconquistas, the new rulers wanted to reassert the dominance of their religion. All over the country, mosques were knocked down and Cathedrals built in their place.

In Zaragoza, the magnificent cathedral of La Seo is the result. It’s on the site of the old grand mosque of Saraqustra – itself on the site of an even older church, which itself is on the site of an even older Roman Temple. And there’s evidence that even this was on the site of an even older Iberian temple.

It took hundreds of years to complete, giving the building a magnificent array of architectural styles. But for our purposes, the most important is also one of its oldest: the Mudéjar wall, pictured above.

You see, although the new Christian rulers wanted to assert the supremacy of Christianity, they were huge fans of Islamic aesthetic. So some Muslim craftsmen were allowed to stay. These were known as ‘mudéjars’ – roughly translating to ‘those allowed to stay’.

Many of these artisans were employed to design elements for new Christian buildings, giving rise to Mudéjar architecture – a style utterly magnificent in its fusion of Christian and Islamic styles, and totally unique to Spain.

The wall of La Seo is one of the finest examples you’ll find anywhere – a dazzling array of colourful tiles that have weathered centuries of history. It’s one of several sites making up the UNESCO World Heritage Site of mudéjar architecture in Aragon, many of which are found in Zaragoza.

The Basílica de Nuestra Señora del Pilar – Zaragoza as a Pilgrim City

You cant really miss this one. The Basílica del Pilar dominates the Plaza del Pilar and, frankly, dominates Zaragoza. It’s utterly enormous, over 130 metres long, with eleven (eleven!) tiled domes.

Understanding why it’s here and how it got so big tells you a lot about how the Catholic Church shaped this city.

It all starts in 40AD, when the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared on top of a pillar to the Apostle James (Santiago). She told him to build a chapel which, the legend says, he did.

Interestingly, the first written mention of this story and the church built by Santiago comes more than 1,000 years after its said to have happened. The legend gradually built up over the centuries: the first Marian devotion was recorded in 1155, the name ‘del Pilar’ in 1299, and the founding of a church in AD40 in 1318.

It’s no coincidence that these claims start appearing after the Christian reconquest of the city, when the new rulers needed to assert Zaragoza’s importance against rival cities. Emphasising the cult of the Pilar helped to assert Christian authority over the region, and to bring in money from pilgrims.

And the strategy worked. It received Papal endorsements in the 13th and 15th century. By the medieval period, pilgrims were coming from across the Iberian Peninsula, and the shrine became politically essential: the kings of Aragon took their oaths of fidelity here.

The current building is the result of all that accumulated power. Construction began in 1681, replacing the previous church that had burned down in 1434. The sheer scale of it shows the influence of the church in the city.

The Basilica’s significance eventually grew beyond Zaragoza, beyond even Spain. The feast day — October 12 — coincides with Columbus’s arrival in the Americas, and later became Spain’s national day, the Día de la Hispanidad.

It’s now the second most visited pilgrimage site in Spain, after Santiago de Compostela. People come from all over the world and queue daily to kiss the Pilar itself.

La Lonja – Zaragoza’s merchant hub

By the 16th century, in part due to its growing pilgrimage status, Zaragoza was thriving. The city’s merchants and bankers especially were doing well – but for centuries, they’d been conducting their deals inside churches.

And so La Lonja was built, a statement of civic ambition and to provide merchants with a dedicated exchange hall. It was built in the 16th century, and is considered one of the first fully Renaissance structures in the city.

From the outside, the three-storey brick façade is handsome but restrained. Inside it’s much more extravagant, and can be visited for free when there’s an exhibition on.

Renaissance Palaces – the Florence of Spain

La Lonja’s pride of place – on the Plaza del Pilar, between the two cathedrals – showed the importance of trade in Zaragoza. But to truly understand Renaissance Zaragoza, visit its palaces.

During the 16th century, many of the city’s merchants and bankers were growing extremely wealthy. And due to this, the city came to be one of Spain’s great renaissance cities. So many beautiful palaces were built some even called it the Spanish Florence.

Nowadays, you can still visit many of these palaces. And remarkably, many of them have simply been repurposed into every day life: former renaissance palaces are now home to magistrate courts, the city’s Goya collection, and regional government offices, among others.

The most magnificent of Zaragoza’s renaissance gems, though, is surely the Patio de la Infanta. This courtyard is all that’s left of the 16th century palace of Gabriel Zaporta, a wealthy banker who converted from Judaism to Christianity.

After the palace was damaged by fires and demolished in 1903, a French antique dealer bought the courtyard and shipped it to Paris, where it served as a showroom for over fifty years. In 1958, the local bank Ibercaja bought it back and eventually installed it in their headquarters, where you can visit it today for a couple of euros.

It’s a small space, but it’s a genuine jewel. A renaissance courtyard in a 20th century bank building, home to some of the most exquisite Renaissance carving in Spain. The fact that it exists at all feels like a minor miracle.

The Puerta del Carmen – Napoleon’s Bullet Holes

Zaragoza thrived so much during the Renaissance that you might wonder why it isn’t better known internationally, or why its streets don’t show this wealth more obviously. There are several reasons for that, but part of the answer can be seen in this stone gate, still standing at the edge of the old town.

Zaragoza has had the misfortune of sitting directly on the main route from France into Spain, and it has paid for that geography dearly.

The Puerta del Carmen is a neoclassical gate, built in the 18th century in the style of a Roman arch. There were once several medieval and Roman gates to the city, but this is the only survivor.

In the early 19th century, Zaragoza came under siege twice from French troops. The first, in 1808, saw French troops repeatedly storm the city. The city held.

But a year later in February 1809, the city fell. The city was devastated. Much of it lay in ruins. Of a pre-war population of over 70,000, only around 12,000 remained.

It was such a horrific battle, it’s often compared to Stalingrad as an example of total urban warfare: forces fought house to house. Goya immortalised the horror of the war in his Disasters of War etchings, which you can still see in the city.

On the Puerta del Carmen, you can still see the city’s battle scars: bullet holes from artillery and rifle fire, left as a memorial to the battle.

The footprints of fascism in Zaragoza

After the destruction of the Napoleonic wars, the city was reconstructed. Wide boulevards in the style of Parisian streets were built over the following century – such as the stunning Calle Alfonso I – along with the wonderful central market building.

And then came another horror: the Spanish Civil War.

Compared to many other Spanish cities, Zaragoza got off relatively lightly – at least in terms of urban destruction. General Franco, who would go on to spend almost 40 years as Spain’s dictator, had headed up Zaragoza’s Military Academy and had plenty of connections in the city. Almost as soon as the war started, it fell to the fascists, and saw very little fighting.

One of the only visible scars of the war itself can be seen in the Basílica de Nuestra Señora del Pilar. Republican bombs hit the Basilica’s roof, creating two holes in its domes. But neither exploded. Bomb shaped holes in the church’s ceiling tearing through the religious artwork were the extent of the damage.

This was a huge propaganda victory for General Franco: it allowed him to claim the God was on his side. You can still see the damage from these bombs in the artworks they affected. The bombs, too, have been kept to memorialise this moment.

Of course, General Franco and the Nationalists won the war, and Spain spent many decades under the iron grip of the dictator. One of the key factors in winning the war was the support his army received from Europe’s other fascist states – Italy and Germany. There are two sites in the city that come from this fascist alliance.

The first is right in the centre of town, by the large, handsome Mercado Central building: a statue of Augustus.

At first it looks like a straightforward tribute to the city’s Roman founder.

But it was a gift from Mussolini’s government to Franco’s Spain in 1940 – a gesture of fascist solidarity dressed up as shared Roman heritage. You can still see the etching ‘A. XVIII E.F.’ – standing for year 18 of the fascist era.

The more confronting site is the Church of San Antonio de Padua, sometimes called the “Church of the Italians,” on the southern edge of the city.

The tower attached to this Franciscan church is actually a military mausoleum, built in the early 1940s as a tribute to the Italian soldiers who fought for Franco.

The tower has a fortress-like appearance that feels deliberately imposing.

And you can still see how this politics is playing out, even in modern Spain: when I visited, the sign marking this as a ‘Sacrario militare Italiano’ had been graffitied over, and someone had written ‘mierda’ beneath.

The Zaha Hadid Bridge and CaixaForum — Modern Zaragoza emerges

Spain became a democracy in the late 1970s, and in the decades after, cities across the country tried to reinvent themselves.

Many held mega-events to attract investment and tourism: Zaragoza’s came in 2008, with its Expo themed around water and sustainable development.

The results are mixed. The star piece is the Bridge Pavilion by Zaha Hadid, a genuinely stunning modern bridge spanning the Ebro, now used as an interactive museum and a real symbol of a city confidently asserting itself in the 21st century.

But the rest of the Expo site tells a slightly more sobering story. The event cost more than a billion euros, and attracted over 5 million visitors – but only a very small portion were international.

Overall, it lost a lot of money, and many of the Expo buildings are still struggling to find uses.

There are two far more successful pieces of modern architecture elsewhere in the city – the CaixaForum and the IAACC Pablo Serrano, an ambitious vertical extension to a historic industrial building. Both are bold, confident and striking examples of contemporary architecture, working well as public cultural spaces.

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Overall, Zaragoza is a compact, walkable city that wears its history and its various identities on its sleeve.

In just a short walk, you can move from a Roman theatre to a Muslim fortress, from a Mudéjar bell tower to a Baroque basilica. Go a little further and you’ll find Napoleonic bullet holes and a Zaha Hadid bridge; a fascist-era church and a Renaissance courtyard.

Very few cities in Europe pack that much history into such a small space – and even fewer do it with so little fanfare.

Read more Zaragoza and Aragon guides

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