Vila-seca entdecken

The Praetorium is a Roman tower of the provincial forum, built in the 1st century AD to hold the stairs from the lower town through the circus up to the forum; in the Middle Ages it became the King's Castle. A passage leads from it into the vaulted corridors that carried the stands of the Roman circus, built for chariot races.

Tarragona Cathedral stands at the highest point of the old town, on a site once occupied by a Roman temple of the imperial cult. Begun around 1171 and consecrated in 1331, it marks the transition from Romanesque to Gothic, with a west front built around a large rose window and a 13th-century cloister with carved capitals.

Tarragona's Roman amphitheatre was built around the start of the 2nd century AD just outside Tarraco, beside the sea, for gladiator fights and animal hunts. In 259 Bishop Fructuosus and his deacons Augurius and Eulogius were burnt alive in its arena, and the ruins of a Visigothic basilica and the Romanesque church of Santa Maria del Miracle stand inside it.

The Roman walls of Tarragona were first raised in stone between about 217 and 197 BC, when Tarraco was still a military base, and later extended to enclose the whole town down to the port. The Passeig Arqueològic path runs along them past huge base blocks and three Roman towers: the Archbishop's, Cabiscol and Minerva towers.

Parc Samà is a 14-hectare Romantic garden near Cambrils, laid out from 1881 to a design by Josep Fontserè for Salvador Samà, Marquis of Marianao, whose family had made its fortune in Cuba. Paths wind past a lake with suspension bridges, a cascade and grottoes, palm groves, a small palace and an aviary of Central American birds.

Mas Miró is the family farm outside Mont-roig del Camp where Joan Miró spent long periods of his life and which he painted in The Farm (1921–22). Its buildings date from the 18th to the 20th century; visitors see the main house, the neo-Gothic chapel of 1916 and the studio Miró built in the late 1940s, its walls still bearing his sketches.