Tarragona

Tarragona (, ; Phoenician: Tarqon; ) is a port city located in northeast Spain on the Costa Daurada by the Mediterranean Sea. Founded before the fifth century BC, it is the capital of the Province of Tarragona, and part of Tarragonès and Catalonia. It shares a border in the north with the Province of Barcelona and the Province of Lleida. History Origins One Catalan legend holds that Tarragona was named for Tarraho, eldest son of Tubal in c. 2407 BC; another (derived from Strabo and Megasthenes) attributes the name to 'Tearcon the Ethiopian', a seventh-century BC pharaoh who campaigned in Spain. The real founding date of Tarragona is unknown. The city may have begun as an Iberian town called or , named after the Iberian tribe of the region, the Cossetans, though the identification of Tarragona with Kesse is not certain. William Smith suggests that the city was probably founded by the Phoenicians, who called it , which, according to Samuel Bochart, means a citadel. This name was probably derived from its situation on a high rock, between above the sea; whence we find it characterised as . It was seated on the river Sulcis or Tulcis (modern Francolí), on a bay of the Mare Internum (Mediterranean), between the Pyrenees and the River Iberus (modern Ebro). Livy mentions a ; and according to Eratosthenes it had a naval station or roads; but Artemidorus Ephesius says with more probability that it had none, and scarcely even an anchoring place; and Strabo himself calls it "harbourless". This better reflects its present condition; for though a mole was constructed in the 15th century with the materials of the ancient amphitheatre, and another subsequently by an Irishman named John Smith Sinnot, it still affords little protection for shipping.