Zaragoza’s Roman name still hides inside Saraqusta
Aragon’s capital began as Iberian Salduie before Augustus planted veterans’ colony Caesaraugusta between 25 and 11 BC. Arabic Saraqusta and Spanish Zaragoza are worn-down echoes of that imperial name—now a city of about 699,000 that hosted Expo 2008 on water and sustainability.
Zaragoza (English Saragossa) is capital of both its province and Spain’s autonomous community of Aragon, sitting on the Ebro about 300 kilometres northeast of Madrid. As of 2025 it counted 699,007 residents across nearly 974 square kilometres, Spain’s fourth-most-populous city, anchoring a metro of roughly a million. Its famous pilgrimage basilica, the old cathedral known as La Seo, and the Islamic-era Aljafería fortress headline a Mudéjar ensemble on the World Heritage list. Expo 2008 put the river city on a global stage.
Sedetani Iberians lived at Salduie before Rome. Augustus founded Caesaraugusta as a veterans’ colony after the Cantabrian wars, complete with forum, baths, and theatre. Tradition links the Apostle James to a chapel on the future Pilar site; a church later marked the supposed martyrdom of Saint Engratia. Gothic conquest in the fifth century was relatively undestructive. In the eighth century Zaragoza became capital of al-Andalus’s Upper March.
When Córdoba’s caliphate fractured, Zaragoza emerged in 1018 as an independent taifa under the Tujibids, then the Banu Hud from 1039, prospering as a cultured court before Christian conquest. The linguistic trail—Salduie to Caesaraugusta to Saraqusta to Zaragoza—lets a modern Ebro metropolis wear two thousand years of renaming without erasing the Roman lattice beneath. Alfonso I of Aragon took the city from the Almoravids on 18 December 1118 and made it his kingdom’s capital, locking the Ebro crossing into Christian Spain’s map.
Source: Zaragoza
