Empuries (Ampurias) (208 pictures)

Throughout the 7th century BC, the indigenous inhabitants of this area of the Emporda coast lived in different places on the headlands and hills there were in the marshes. One of these settlements from the Iron Age was on a small isthmus, where what today is the village of Sant Marti d'Empuries is found. This inhabited nucleus, which dates back to the end of the Bronze Age (9th century BC), had trade contacts with the Etruscans, the Phoenicians and the Greeks during the 7th century BC. In the first half of the 6th century BC, the Greek traders from Phocaea founded, particularly in this indigenous village, a first settlement (the Palaia polis) and years later created the new sector of the city (the Nea Polis), the remains of which are part of this visit to the archaeological site (the Greek city). The colony was called Emporion, which in Greek means market. The city developed thanks to the commercial activity of the Greeks with the indigenous peoples of the Peninsula. In fact, their influence and culture were the features that conditioned the development of the indigenous people, giving rise to the birth of the Iberian culture. The Iberian people of the Emporda belonged to the Indiketes tribe.

In 218 BC, on the occasion of the Second Punic War, a Roman army under Gnaeus Cornelius Scipio landed at the port of Empuries with the aim of blocking land access to the Carthaginian troops. This was the process that was to start the romanisation of the Iberian Peninsula. In 195 BC, Marcus Porcius Cato set up a military camp at Empuries that was the embryo of the new city (the Roman city), created at the beginning of the 1st century BC. In the times of the emperor Augustus, the Greek and Roman cities became one physically and legally under the name of Municipium Emporiae (Last quarter of the 1st century BC).

As Gerunda (Girona), Barcino (Barcelona), Tarraco (Tarragona) and other Roman cities on the Peninsula became increasingly more important, so Emporiae gradually lost its impotance. In the second half of the 3rd century AD, the whole of the Roman city and the area of the Neapolis were abandoned, and the people settled in Sant Marti d'Empuries. This city was Episcopal throughout the whole of the Late Antiquity period, and its inhabitants used the area to the north of the Neapolis as a cemetery, which is where we can find the remains of a funeral chapel.

After the invasion of the Moors and its recovery by the Franks (8th century) Empuries was the capital of the Carolingian county of Empuries and was later the capital of the mediaeval county of Empuries until the 11^th century, when the count moved the capital to Castello. From that time, Empuries was inhabited by small group of fishermen who in the 16th century founded the town of L'Escala.