Finally, the penny dropped! Zaragoza is a corruption of the Roman name of Caesar Augusta!

The Roman city is several meters below the current ground level, which makes archeological access quite difficult. There are four museums that enable one to see the remains.

And, boy! Do they work them!

The remains of the theatre are under a canvas screen, with the attached museum containing a variety of artefacts, info panels, and video of the story of the theatre. It is also air conditioned.

In itself, there’s not much to see of the Roman remains. All the marble was plundered long ago, and everything above the first tier of seating has long since been lost, leaving concrete piles more resembling a massive washed out sand castle.

After that, I went to the forum baths. They weren’t yet open (although the opening hours days they should be), so I went for a coffee.

After coffee, I went into the bath museum. This was underground beneath a tower block – so that we get to see any of it is amazing.

Once again, they really worked the material that they had. There were very few info panels in any language other than Spanish. English appears a couple of times. I actually tried to avoid the English and read the Spanish… mostly successfully, which is where the rare English panel helped with words I wasn’t sure of.

It was lunchtime, and the other two museums were closed for the afternoon and wouldn’t reopen until 5pm, so I had a slice of pizza and went for a lie down in my hotel room.

I enjoyed my siesta and was ready to dodge the sunshine and explore the next two museums.

I tried to keep to the shade, but the shady side of the street has been heated by the morning sun and was now radiating that stored heat back at me. However, it was still better than walking in the late afternoon sunshine. Best of all is to walk along narrow streets that haven’t seen any sunshine.

The first of the evening’s museums was the Roman city’s water gate. The door handle almost burnt my hand as I tried to enter the building. And the door was stiff. Ouch!

Inside, the lovely person at the desk chatted about the almost molten handle in Spanish. I understood what she meant, but couldn’t assemble language quickly enough to respond with anything more intelligent than “si”.

She struggled to get the video going, so I said “quizas miraré el museo y revuelve luego”. I’m not sure that I got it right, Google thinks that I said “Maybe I’ll look at the museum and rummage through it later”, but the museum staff knew what I meant and nodded as they continued to fiddle with the equipment.

The water gate remains were slightly more impressive than the baths in terms of volume, but communicated less by themselves – except for a flight of steps starting halfway up a wall, however again the amount of additional information that the museum communicated about the Roman city and the legions who founded it was impressive.

Upstairs, the staff had got the video working. She came and pressed play. It was probably ten minutes long and I forget what it covered. But I don’t care: I was cool and entertained.

The final museum was the forum museum. It has an entrance poking above the city’s main plaza (Plaza de Nuestra Señora del Pilar). What’s beneath is pretty impressive in that it’s a reasonable chunk under the square.

The upper level (still below that if the current street) is really well made use of. Walls a couple of feet high explained as shops and taverns, with the odd vignette to illustrate what the insides might have been like. I wonder how many people notice that the layout is pretty similar to many shop fronts in the Med area?

The lower section was particularly interesting. A section of drain, large sections of water pipes (no, the Romans didn’t die of lead poisoning), even more models, info panels, and the mandatory video. This time the video was from the point of view of the river. I think I enjoyed it – once I decided that I wasn’t going to allow it to patronise me.

In the museum shop, I bought another book; this one about Roman Zaragoza. I can already feel the weight of it joining the others in my rucksack. It is also in Spanish.

And so to dinner!