Qualla: Torre dels Escipions

Torre dels Escipions: Introduction

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bernard Gagnon, CC BY-SA 3.0. The tower is named for two men who are almost certainly not buried in it. For centuries, travelers on the road out of Tarragona looked up at the pair of carved figures on this Roman tomb and saw the Scipio brothers, the generals who brought Rome to Spain, and the name Tower of the Scipios stuck fast. It was a mistake. The figures are not the Scipios at all but the Phrygian god Attis, and the identity of whoever actually rests here has been lost for nearly two thousand years. What survives is the monument itself, three tiers of weathered stone standing where the Romans meant the dead to be seen.

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Image: Bernard Gagnon | CC BY-SA 3.0

Torre dels Escipions: A Tomb Beside the Road

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jaumellecha, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Romans did not bury their dead in the heart of the city. By custom and by law, the departed were laid to rest outside the walls, and the roads leading out of town became avenues of tombs, so that every traveler entering or leaving passed among the monuments of the deceased. T...

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Image: Jaumellecha | CC BY-SA 4.0

Torre dels Escipions: The God of Death and Rebirth

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Macmanu, CC BY-SA 3.0. The tower rises in three superimposed stories set on a tapering base, built from rectangular stone blocks. On its intermediate level are the two reliefs that gave the monument its fame and its confusion: images of Attis, the Phrygian god associated with death and resurrection. Th...

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Image: Macmanu | CC BY-SA 3.0

Torre dels Escipions: The Tower That Wears a Wrong Name

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CasperCamenisch, CC BY-SA 4.0. The famous name is a case of mistaken identity that history refused to correct. For years, the two weathered figures of Attis were read as portraits of the brothers Publius and Gnaeus Cornelius Scipio, the Roman commanders who fought and died in Spain during the Second Punic War....

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Image: CasperCamenisch | CC BY-SA 4.0

Torre dels Escipions: One of the Last of Its Kind

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rafael dP from España, CC BY-SA 2.0. Whatever we call it, the tower matters because so few like it remain. It is counted among the most important funerary monuments of the Roman era still standing on the Iberian Peninsula, a rare survivor of a form that once lined roads across the empire. Today it is one element of ...

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Image: Rafael dP from España | CC BY-SA 2.0