Balaguer
Balaguer was conquered from the Moors by Ermengol VI of Urgell in 1106; he made it his new capital, and it remained so for subsequent counts of Urgell.
The town has a Gothic bridge, the "Pont de Sant Miquel", over the Segre river. This bridge was destroyed during the Spanish Civil War in the battle of "Cap de Pont" (bridgehead battle in 1938) and rebuilt after the war.
Another Gothic building is the Santa Maria Church, in the heights above the city, in line with a quite finely conserved wall dating to the 15th century AD.
The historic town is on the right bank of the Segre but, following the Spanish Civil War, construction began on a modern bridge, which initiated development of a modern extension of the town on the left bank.
General Franco's forces first entered Catalonia from Aragon in 1938 through Balaguer's bridgehead.
* Josep Ivan Argelaga, performance artists "dogman"
* Gaspar de Portolà, founder of San Diego (United States) and Monterey (United States).
* Peter IV of Aragon, King of the Crown of Aragon.
* Antoni Torres García, footballer
Map - Balaguer
Map
Country - Spain
Flag of Spain |
Anatomically modern humans first arrived in the Iberian Peninsula around 42,000 years ago. The ancient Iberian and Celtic tribes, along with other pre-Roman peoples, dwelled the territory maintaining contacts with foreign Mediterranean cultures. The Roman conquest and colonization of the peninsula (Hispania) ensued, bringing the Romanization of the population. Receding of Western Roman imperial authority ushered in the migration of different non-Roman peoples from Central and Northern Europe with the Visigoths as the dominant power in the peninsula by the fifth century. In the early eighth century, most of the peninsula was conquered by the Umayyad Caliphate, and during early Islamic rule, Al-Andalus became a dominant peninsular power centered in Córdoba. Several Christian kingdoms emerged in Northern Iberia, chief among them León, Castile, Aragon, Portugal, and Navarre made an intermittent southward military expansion, known as Reconquista, repelling the Islamic rule in Iberia, which culminated with the Christian seizure of the Emirate of Granada in 1492. Jews and Muslims were forced to choose between conversion to Catholicism or expulsion, and eventually the converts were expelled through different royal decrees.
Currency / Language
ISO | Currency | Symbol | Significant figures |
---|---|---|---|
EUR | Euro | € | 2 |
ISO | Language |
---|---|
EU | Basque language |
CA | Catalan language |
GL | Galician language |
OC | Occitan language |
ES | Spanish language |