Arc de Berà

The Arch of Berà is named after the wrong person. Built around 13 BC in honour of Emperor Augustus, it somehow acquired the name of Count Berà of Barcelona — a historical figure who lived some nine hundred years later and had nothing whatsoever to do with its construction.

A name that stuck by mistake

The arch’s real origin is well documented: a partially preserved inscription confirms it was erected by testamentary order of Lucius Licinius Sura, a distinguished Roman official who would later serve as consul in 102 and 107 AD, honouring Emperor Augustus and likely marking the boundary of Tarraco’s territory along the Via Augusta. Yet somewhere across the following centuries, local tradition attached an entirely different, much later name to the monument — Berà, after a 9th-century count of Barcelona with no genuine connection to the arch at all. The mistaken name simply outlasted the correct history, and today it’s the official one, printed on every map and road sign for the site.

Survived deterioration, bad restoration, and an attempt to blow it up

Two thousand years is a long time for a single stone structure to survive intact, and the Arch of Berà hasn’t done so unscathed. Beyond ordinary weathering, the monument has endured what its own custodians describe as “ill-conceived restoration projects” over the centuries — well-meaning repairs that in some cases did more harm than the passage of time itself — and, more dramatically, a documented attempt to destroy it with explosives. It survived both. What stands today is consequently not quite what Roman travellers on the Via Augusta would have seen, but it remains recognisably the same honorary arch, still marking the same stretch of road two millennia later.

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