In search of the lost temple

The ghost of Augustus haunts Tarragona. The subject of speculation for centuries, Tarraco´s temple dedicated to this Emperor-God thought to be buried underneath the Romanesque-Gothic Cathedral of Tarragona is slowly revealing its secrets. Its exact location and characteristics have long remained shrouded in mystery. According to most specialists, the steps leading up to the cathedral were built on top of the Roman steps and the cathedral was built on top of the Temple of Augustus. That´s the way it goes in Tarragona. Built in the 1st century AD and restored by Hadrian in 122-123AD, the Roman imperial temple, located on the highest and most prestigious point on the uppermost terrace of the Parte Alta of the city, was the most sacred site of Hispania Citerior, a site of religious ceremonies dedicated to Augustus. He was of course the man who resided in Tarraco in 27-25BC - which made the city the centre of the Roman Empire during those years- and elevated the city´s status to that of capital of an imperial province.
The model for this sacred complex - a porticoed plaza with the dominating Temple of Augustus at is centre - was the monumental complex built by Augustus in Rome itself, reproducing the Hellenistic ideal of an organic sequence of temple, public area and circus constructed from the summit of a hill downwards. Tarraco was the first city after Rome itself to boast a Temple dedicated to Augustus. One of the wall portions of the sacred complex can be seen in the seat of the College of Industrial Engineers in C/Escrivanies Velles; and an apse in the Bible Museum and seat of the Consell Comarcal in C/ Coques. Many, many fragments of pedestals for statues, of columns, of friezes and of marble decorative elements have been retrieved in a variety of archeological sites. In 2007 a team of international experts using highly advanced radar and geophysical technologies scanned the underground of the medieval cathedral to uncover the base of the Roman sanctuary buried 1,5 metre below the cathedral. The results were published last year. The Dan Brown-esque search for the ghost of Augustus in Tarragona is taken to new scientific heights in the intriguing high-resolution images of the subsurface of the cathedral attached below. The next step might be a number of small excavations in specific spots in the central nave of the cathedral. No news so far in this respect. Yet it is thanks to work like this that Tarraco´s acropolis ensemble - along with that of the city of Lyon in France - is now the best known of its kind in the entire Western Roman Empire outside Rome.