Nearly every English-language account of Pamplona’s origins repeats the same line: the Roman general Pompey founded the city in 75 BC and named it after himself. The line is not wrong so much as it is half the story. When Pompey’s legions pitched their winter camp on this plateau above the Río Arga, a Vascon town was already standing on it, and had been for centuries. Pompaelo was not a city conjured out of empty ground. It was a Roman name, a Roman grid, and a Roman garrison laid over a settlement the Vascones called Iruña.
The difference matters because it explains the city you walk through today. Pamplona has carried two names for more than two thousand years, and both are still on the street signs: Pamplona from Pompey’s Pompaelo, and Iruña, the Basque name that predates him. Miss the older town and you miss why the Casco Viejo sits exactly where it does, why the Navarrería is the oldest corner of it, and why construction crews in the city center keep hitting Roman walls, mosaics, and baths a meter below the pavement.
This article draws on the Ayuntamiento de Pamplona’s own published city history, on the ancient geographers Strabo and Pliny the Elder who described Roman Pamplona in writing, on the excavation record built over decades by María Ángeles Mezquíriz of the Museo de Navarra, and on the academic studies of the 2001 to 2004 Plaza del Castillo dig, the find that forced historians to redraw the Roman city’s limits.
Iruña Before Pompey: The Vascon Town Under the City
Humans have lived on this ground for a very long time. Stone tools found on the terraces of the Río Arga date human presence in the Pamplona basin back roughly 75,000 years. By the first millennium BC, according to the city council’s own historical summary, a settled Vascon community existed beneath what is now the city center. Its name, Iruña, is usually read as Basque for “the city,” from hiri, town. The variant Iruñea appears in Basque usage today, and both forms remain in everyday and administrative use. A town that locals simply called “the city” was, by definition, the reference point of its region.
Numismatics backs up that centrality. Coins minted in the area in the second and first centuries BC carry the legend Bascunes or Barscunes on one face and Bengoda on the other, which the numismatist Antonio Beltrán Martínez interpreted as the mint of the Vascon capital. The picture that emerges from the archaeology and the coinage is consistent: before a single legionary arrived, this plateau held the principal town of the Vascones, positioned above a river crossing on the natural corridor between the Ebro valley and the passes of the western Pyrenees.
Rome and the Vascones were not strangers when Pompey arrived either. In 90 BC his father, Gnaeus Pompeius Strabo, had granted Roman citizenship to nine Vascon cavalrymen from the town of Ejea for their service at the Battle of Asculum. The relationship that produced Pompaelo was decades in the making.
The Winter Camp of 75 to 74 BC
Pompey came north in the middle of a Roman civil war. The Sertorian War pitted the Roman Senate’s armies against the rebel general Quintus Sertorius, who controlled much of Hispania. Campaigning against Sertorius in the Ebro valley, Pompey pulled his army back toward friendly Vascon territory and wintered on the plateau, in the season spanning 75 and 74 BC. The Ayuntamiento’s own materials carry both years, 75 for his arrival and 74 for the foundation, which is what happens when a founding event is a winter encampment rather than a ribbon cutting.
The clearest ancient witness is the Greek geographer Strabo, writing about a century later. Describing the peoples of northern Hispania, he places the Vascones and names “their principal city Pompelon, as it were, the city of Pompey.” That gloss, Pompeiopolis, tells us how the name was understood in antiquity: a prestige naming in the Hellenistic tradition, the general stamping his name on a strategic town, as consciously as Alexandria carries Alexander. Whether Pompey formally founded a colony or simply renamed and reorganized the existing Iruña remains debated among historians, and the archaeology of the earliest Roman layers is thin. What is not debated is that the town did not begin with him.
The name itself, written Pompaelo in most modern usage and Pompelo or Pompelon in the ancient sources, is likely a hybrid: Pompey’s name grafted onto an Aquitanian or Vasconic ending. Two thousand years of pronunciation drift turned it into Pamplona in Spanish and Pampelune in French, while Basque speakers went on calling the city Iruña, exactly as they had before Pompey ever saw it.
What Kind of Roman City Pompaelo Actually Was
Pompaelo was never a Rome in miniature on the scale of Mérida or Zaragoza, and the ancient record is honest about its rank. Pliny the Elder, cataloguing Hispania in his Naturalis Historia, lists Pompelo among the tributary communities, a civitas stipendiaria, of the judicial district of Caesaraugusta, modern Zaragoza, in the province of Hispania Tarraconensis. Tributary status meant the city paid taxes to Rome and held neither colonial nor municipal privileges in the early imperial period. It was a working provincial town, not a showcase.
What made it matter was the road. Pompaelo sat on the great route from Asturica, modern Astorga, to Burdigala, modern Bordeaux, the via numbered XXXIV in the Antonine Itinerary, one of the main land connections between the Iberian Peninsula and Gaul. The city council’s history summarizes the Roman logic in one phrase: Pompey enhanced the site’s function as a strategic link between the peninsula and Europe. That function never went away. The same corridor later carried medieval pilgrims on the Camino de Santiago, who still enter the city across the Puente de la Magdalena, and it carries motorway traffic today.
Most of what is known about the Roman town’s fabric comes from the patient work of María Ángeles Mezquíriz, the longtime director of the Museo de Navarra, whose excavations from the 1950s onward established Pompaelo’s urban layout and produced the reference works on the subject. The core of the Roman city lay under today’s Navarrería, the oldest quarter of the Casco Viejo, roughly between the cathedral and the Plaza del Castillo. Under the cathedral area, excavation has documented a public zone near the forum; under the surrounding streets, houses, mosaics, and two bath complexes. Runners who sprint up Calle Estafeta each July are moving a few meters above the eastern edge of that buried grid, along what was open ground at the Roman city’s limit.
The Dig That Rewrote the City’s Size
For most of the twentieth century, scholars assumed Pompaelo was compact, confined to the Navarrería. Then, in July 2001, machines began digging an underground car park beneath the Plaza del Castillo, the city’s main square, and the ground gave up almost everything at once.
The rescue excavation that ran until March 2004 uncovered occupation layers from the Iron Age to the modern era, including an undatable menhir, medieval fortifications, and, most importantly for the Roman question, a large public bath complex of the first century AD. Scholars who studied the remains rank those baths among the most important known in the Roman north of the Iberian Peninsula. Their location was the revelation: the Plaza del Castillo lies well west of the Navarrería, which means Roman Pamplona extended considerably further than the old consensus allowed, and a town of tributary rank had built itself thermae of serious ambition.
The same dig produced a second landmark find from a later era: a maqbara, an Islamic cemetery of some 190 graves radiocarbon-dated between 713 and 799 AD, the oldest Islamic necropolis yet documented in the Iberian Peninsula, cut in places straight through the abandoned Roman structures. Between the baths and the maqbara, the square turned out to be one of the richest urban archaeological sites in northern Spain.
Almost none of it survives in place. The car park was built, and the remains, apart from a fragment of the medieval wall, were dismantled, removed, or destroyed. The decision was fought publicly at the time and is still cited in Spain as a cautionary case in heritage management. The recovered materials and documentation went to the institutions of the Gobierno de Navarra, and researchers, including a 2026 lecture at the Museo Arqueológico Nacional in Madrid, continue to publish on what was salvaged. The visitor standing in the square today sees café terraces and a bandstand, with two thousand years of the city stacked invisibly below.
Where to Find Pompaelo Today
The single best place to meet the Roman city is the Museo de Navarra, which stands on Cuesta de Santo Domingo at the western edge of the old town. Its Roman rooms hold the finds from the Navarrería excavations, above all the second-century AD mosaic of Theseus and the Minotaur, discovered in the nineteenth-century digs that first revealed Roman Pamplona to modern eyes, along with a black-and-white mosaic of towered walls that some scholars read as a stylized image of a walled city. The first of those excavations, in 1856, marks the beginning of Pompaelo archaeology.
In the streets, the traces are quieter. On Calle Compañía, in the Navarrería, the entrance arch of a Roman bath complex survives inside a café, and rehabilitation work at number 3 in 2021 exposed more walls of the same baths, now marked by a small explanatory display. The street names themselves preserve the deeper history: Navarrería, the borough of the Navarrese, sits precisely on the Roman core, which is why it is the oldest of the three medieval boroughs that later fought one another from behind separate walls until 1423, one chapter in the larger history of Pamplona and its four foundings. The city’s later fortifications, the Renaissance walls and gates that visitors photograph today, are a different and much younger story, as none of the surviving city gates are Roman or even medieval.
For the institutional record, the Ayuntamiento de Pamplona publishes its own accessible city history at pamplona.es, and the Gobierno de Navarra’s cultural portal culturanavarra.es covers the Museo de Navarra and the region’s archaeological research.
FAQ
Who founded Pamplona and when?
The Roman general Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, Pompey, established the Roman city of Pompaelo during his winter encampment of 75 to 74 BC, in the course of the Sertorian War. But he did not found the settlement itself. A Vascon town known as Iruña had existed on the site since roughly the first millennium BC, and Pamplona’s city council states this plainly in its own published history. Pompey founded the Roman city; the town is older.
What does Pompaelo mean?
Pompaelo, also written Pompelo in the ancient sources, means “city of Pompey.” The geographer Strabo glossed the name as Pompeiopolis, making the intent explicit. The name is generally read as Pompey’s family name attached to a local Vasconic or Aquitanian ending, and over twenty centuries it evolved into the modern name Pamplona, while the Basque name Iruña continued in parallel use.
Are there Roman ruins to see in Pamplona today?
Yes, but mostly in a museum rather than in the open. The Museo de Navarra displays the mosaics, inscriptions, and artifacts excavated from Pompaelo, including the Theseus and the Minotaur mosaic from the second century AD. In the Navarrería, a Roman bath arch survives inside a café on Calle Compañía with a small explanatory display nearby. The major Roman baths found under the Plaza del Castillo between 2001 and 2004 were not preserved, so the square holds nothing visible today.
Is Iruña the same city as Pamplona?
Yes. Iruña, also written Iruñea, is the Basque name for Pamplona, and both names are in current use across the city. The name is usually understood as “the city” in Basque and it predates the Roman name, going back to the Vascon settlement that stood on the plateau before Pompey’s arrival. The two names have coexisted for more than two thousand years.
Every article on the Encierro blog is authored or reviewed by active bull runners with direct experience in Pamplona.