Travel Guide Zaragoza

With over 375,000 inhabitants, it is the fifth largest city in Spain. Located in the middle of a vast plain crossed by the Ebro River, it has developed since the 12th century as a meeting point between the rugged Pyrenees and the vast desert expanses of the sierras. Successively occupied by the Iberians, Romans, Muslims and Christians, it has earned its title of "city of four cultures". A business center like Barcelona or Madrid, a city of art and history, a capital of leisure, beautiful Zaragoza invites you to a pleasant and enriching stay. Yet the city has gone through historical crises and violent stages of construction. A Roman city under the name of Caesar Augusta in 25 B.C., the Virgin appeared to St. James some sixty years later, leaving a simple pillar as a trace. It was around this pledge of spirituality and faith (the pilar) that the famous basilica of the same name, symbol of the city, was built much later. The Aljaferia is the other monument of the city, memory of the medieval occupation of the Muslims, when the city was called Sarakusta. Closer to our time, the Napoleonic wars, and precisely in 1808 the war of independence against the French, which sacked a good part of the city, massacred a large number of inhabitants. In addition to the Casco Antiguo, it is worthwhile to discover the new spaces that have been developed near the Ebro River or around the 2008 Exposition area, and to visit the San Pablo neighborhood, a particularly successful example of the renovation of a neighborhood that has maintained the presence of its residents.