The Via Augusta (also known as the Via Herculea or Via Exterior) was the longest and busiest of the major roads built by the Romans in ancient Hispania (the Iberian Peninsula). According to historian Pierre Sillières, who has supervised excavation of Roman sites in Spain to identify the exact route followed by the Via Augusta, it was more a system of roads than a single road. Approximately long, the Via Augusta was built to link Spain with Italy, running from the southwestern coastal city of Gades (Cádiz) to the Pyrenees Mountains along inland valleys parallel to the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. As the main axis of the road network in Roman Hispania, it appears in ancient sources such as the itinerary inscribed on the Vicarello Cups as well in as the Antonine Itinerary.
The highway was named after the emperor Augustus, who ordered reconstruction of the previously existing Via Herculea (or Via Heraklea), which ran from the Pyrenees to Carthago Nova, and extension of the arterial roadway as far as Gades. The works were carried out between 8 BC and 2 BC, taking advantage of what remained of roads that had existed in the time of the Roman Republic. Subsequently, it became an important communications and trade route between the cities and provinces and the ports of the Mediterranean. The Via Augusta was still used by the Muslim occupiers of southern Spain in the 10th century, who called it al-Racif. Its route is currently followed by the N-340 road and the A-7 highway. North of Tarragona there remains a Roman Triumphal arch, the Arc de Berà, around which the road divides. At Martorell, the ancient Via crosses the river Llobregat on the Pont del Diable, which dates from the High Middle Ages (circa 1289) in its current form. At present, the N-IV N-420, N-340 and the Mediterranean Highway ( A-7, AP-7, A-70 ) follow the same itinerary in many sections as the Vía Augusta. In some sections of the current N-340, the Roman road was used until the 1920s, when they were paved during the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera.
Background information
The Roman Empire built roads extending to its far corners; once the Romans had conquered Hispania they began to build roads there as in their other territories. Hispania, the Roman name for the Iberian Peninsula, included what is now Spain, Portugal, Andorra, and the southernmost part of France. When Augustus went to Spain between 16 and 13 BC, he saw the need for roads and ordered the construction of the Via Augusta, the longest and most important road in Hispania. The road passed from near the southern tip of present-day Spain on the Atlantic to the Mediterranean through the Guadalquivir valley and along the coast to the Coll de Pertús (Latin: "Pertusium") pass in the Pyrenees.
The Via Augusta linked Hispania Baetica in the south with the north of Hispania. The still extant Alcantarilla bridge, a double arched stone bridge over the River Salado in Utrera, about south of Seville, has an inscription on the cutwater of one of its pilings indicating that it was on the Via Augusta. The Romans built a fifteen-arched bridge over the River Baetis (the Guadalquivir) at Andújar on the Augustan road. In the second half of the 1st century, with the social stability brought by the Pax Romana, the Roman city of Carmo, now Carmona, became a major crossroads on the Via Augusta and an important outpost in the Roman empire.
Several cities have traces of the roadbed, which roughly follows that of the current AP-7 motorway. There is a fairly long visible stretch in the municipality of El Perelló, in the province of Tarragona. The Arc de Berà is located on the section that passed just south of the city. The strategic position of Roman Barcelona (Barcino) on a spur road of the Via Augusta allowed the city's commercial and economic development. In Barcelona, the ancient Via Augusta corresponds to one of the main avenues, also called "Via Augusta", in the Sarrià-Sant Gervasi district, which connects the Avinguda Diagonal with the Vallvidrera tunnels, passing through Plaça Molina. A large part of line 6 of the Generalitat of Catalonia Railways passes underneath the Via Augusta roadbed.