A trip back into history

Near to the vil­lage of Cogul are to be found a col­lec­tion of some of the most im­por­tant cave art in Cat­alo­nia. De­clared a World Her­itage Site by Un­esco, the Moros rock paint­ings go back 10,000 years when the in­hab­i­tants of the time dec­o­rated the caves with some 50 red and black coloured fig­ures. The cave art so im­pressed the Iber peo­ple and Ro­mans who came later that the site was used by both as a sanc­tu­ary.

The his­tory of Ar­beca be­gins in the Iron Age, when the mem­bers of a small com­mu­nity built a fort on the plain and which be­came their home for the next four cen­turies. Over time, the Iber peo­ple would es­tab­lish a set­tle­ment here, just about a unique act for this cul­ture that al­most al­ways set­tled in nat­u­rally for­ti­fied areas. How­ever, the fort soon be­came too small to house the grow­ing pop­u­la­tion and was even­tu­ally aban­doned. Today, the Iber fort, which has be­come the Vi­lars d'Ar­beca ar­chae­o­log­i­cal site, is one of the area's main at­trac­tions among tourists and stu­dents of his­tory.

One of the most fas­ci­nat­ing sites in the Gar­rigues area, es­pe­cially for lovers of Me­dieval his­tory is the cas­tle of Es­pluga Calba. Founded in the 13th cen­tury on the for­mer site of an old Mus­lim for­ti­fi­ca­tion, the cas­tle came under the ju­ris­dic­tion of the monastery of Vall­bona de les Mon­ges, in Urgell, on the or­ders of King Jaume I.

How­ever, from the year 1405, it passed into the hands of the order of Knights of Saint Joan of Jerusalem. The order went on to man­age the vil­lages and lands in the sur­round­ing area for the next 400 years.

In the 16th cen­tury, the dukes of Car­dona turned the old me­dieval Flo­resta cas­tle, which they used as a sum­mer res­i­dence, into a mag­nif­i­cent Re­nais­sance palace.

The work car­ried out on the build­ing in­cluded win­dows in the ma­jor­ity of rooms, a new stair­case, a cof­fered (wood pan­elled) ceil­ing and a new tower. In the 18th cen­tury, the new own­ers de­cided to carry out more ren­o­va­tions to dec­o­rate the cas­tle's in­te­rior and they also com­mis­sioned the build­ing of a Baroque chapel that was ded­i­cated to saint Blai.

The fam­ily roots of for­mer Gen­er­al­i­tat pres­i­dent, Francesc Macià, are to be found in Borges Blan­ques, where his pre­de­ces­sors were small farm­ers and traded in oil and wine. It is for this rea­son that the county cap­i­tal of Gar­rigues de­cided to com­mem­o­rate the re­pub­li­can politi­cian with a study cen­tre.

The Espai Macià, which opened two years ago, has a per­ma­nent ex­hi­bi­tion with doc­u­men­ta­tion and, au­dio­vi­su­als on this pe­riod of con­tem­po­rary his­tory.