Tarragona

I spent the past few days in Tarragona and the surrounding region on a field trip through school.  Here is a map so you can see where Tarragona is located in comparison to Barcelona (look in the northeast corner).

Tarragona was a major Roman city (called Tarraco back then) so there was an ampitheatre, forum, and aqueducts.  There are still a lot of Roman remains and most of the buildings in the original part of the city are built on top of Roman ruins.

The city is right on the coast and the ampitheatre is almost directly on the beach.  Animal fights (with tigers, elephants, wolves, every animal the Romans could find) were held in the ampitheatre and since many of the animals were imported from North Africa, the ampitheatre's location made bringing in the animals easier.  Aside from having animal fights, there were also gladiator fights and executions (of criminals and of Christians).  So when the Visigoths, who were Christians, conquered Tarraco, they built a church inside the ampitheatre.

This is the view of the ampitheatre from the top of the hill.  Our hotel was located around where I took this picture from.  There was a possibility of having a really gorgeous view overlooking the beach and the ampitheatre.  My room looked out over some rooftops though which I thought was still cool because we were looking into a residential neighborhood.  [Note: the hotel was surprisingly nice, especially for a school trip.  The only bad thing was that our room smelled like sewage.  We called room service and they sprayed half a can of toothpaste-scented disinfectant in our room.  Did not work.]

To the right you can see the church that was built inside the ampitheatre.  Most of the buildings built by the people who conquered the Romans were made out of Roman building materials.  They just deconstructed what the Romans had built and made their own buildings on top of Roman foundations.  Many of the stones in these buildings have symbols marked into them.  When the stones were quarried, the laborers would put their symbol on the blocks so the foremen would know how much to pay each person at the end of the day.  The quarry we saw was amazing.  Really, really deep.  Stone was removed from the quarry with hand tools which must have been so difficult.  They would make holes in the stone and then crack them apart.   Or, in the winter, they would make holes and then pour water into them, let the water freeze and the blocks would break off.

You can still see the lines where the blocks were quarried.  Now, the quarry has trees and other plants growing inside it.   The Romans left a column of stone standing in the middle of the quarry to keep track of the depth of the quarry. 

This was the view of the city from the top of the Roman castle.  Very Mediterranean.  One really cool thing about the terrain here is that you have the ocean and then you have a city and then you have mountains and it's all so close.  The cities were designed like that for military purposes but it's nice to look at too.

I decided to take an artsy picture here (or so I thought).  See the old man towards the left?  I figured it was poetic in some way.  Can't really figure out how though... the photo is open to interpretation.  Really, I just like the blue rowboat.

We visited a monastery in Poblet.  About 30 Cistercian monks still live there.  It was really windy and freezing there.  I cannot imagine being a monk.  The ceilings in the all the rooms are vaulted and at least 30 feet high to intentionally make the rooms difficult to heat and it was quite chilly to say the least.  The monastery had a wonderful library though.  It was huge and had old, dark wooden bookcases.  The monastery used to be the center of culture (instead of an urban area serving this purpose).  After the Moors (Arabs) conquered Spain (711 AD), they translated all of the books into Arabic from ancient languages which the Spanish monks were later able to translate into Spanish so that the books could be read.

Just a note on ancient languages: we went to this Roman villa (interesting but ridiculous since we had to wear tunics-- see our guide to the right) and the whole tour was in Latin.  I took Latin for three years and never heard it spoken since it is a dead language so it was crazy to hear it aloud.  I was actually able to understand a lot of it probably because it's so similar to Spanish.  Since I mentioned the villa, here is a picture of some artwork on one of the remaining walls.  

The trip was from Thursday morning until Saturday night and we were touring from 9 until 5 or 6 every day.  I learned a lot and saw cool things but I am SO GLAD to be back in Barcelona!!!  (Only because I have missed updating this blog.)