The strategic location of Astorga caused the settlement of the Roman conquerors more than two thousand years ago, first, with a military camp of the Legio X Gemina and after with the establishment of the administrative capital of one of its demarcations: conventus asturicense. This has led to archaeological richness, which shows the economic vitality of the Roman Asturica from the first century A.C to the beginning of the third.
The phenomenon of the pilgrimage to Compostela, right in the Middle Ages, provided with a recovery of Astorga as crossroads during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It was then when the construction of churches, monasteries, hospitals and neighbourhood areas turned its town planning with the burial of the old regular design of the Roman time into an organic growth, typical of a medieval society. At the end of the fifteenth century, it begins an unsteady balance between the bishop's and the marquesal's authority with the building of the cathedral.
But until the second half of the nineteenth century, with the arrival of the railway, the development of the current city,which expands outside its walls, does not begin. Astorga is again a significant network of road connections, and it recovers the social and economical vibrancy, which has today in the tourism as one of its main focal points. Welcome.