Hispania Citerior

One of the two original Spanish provinces, organized in 197 BCE after the Second Punic War to administer the eastern Mediterranean coast and Ebro valley Rome had taken from Carthage. Augustus folded it into the much larger Hispania Tarraconensis in his 27 BCE reorganization of the peninsula. Its early decades were marked by near-constant warfare as Rome slowly subdued the fiercely independent Celtiberian tribes of the interior, a conflict so grinding that Roman soldiers dreaded assignment to Hispania more than almost anywhere else in the Republic's growing empire. The province's capital, Tarraco, became one of the first great Roman cities on the Iberian peninsula, with a forum, amphitheatre, and circus whose remains still stand in modern Tarragona. Roman mining operations here, especially silver extraction, helped fund the Republic's wars and made Hispania Citerior one of the most economically vital of Rome's early overseas provinces. Generations of Roman commanders -- including a young Julius Caesar, who served as governor here in the 60s BCE -- used the province as a proving ground before rising to greater commands. Its absorption into Tarraconensis under Augustus reflected the peninsula's pacification: after nearly two centuries of intermittent warfare, Roman rule no longer required the older provincial boundary drawn for military convenience.

• Existed: 197 BCE – 27 BCE
• Type: Entity
• Government: Roman province
• Capital: Tarraco (Tarragona)