Archaeological excavations at Casa Pastors in Girona

Girona City Council has restarted the archaeological excavations at Casa Pastors de Girona. This new phase gives continuity to the work carried out between the months of May and August of this year, and is carried out in view of the need to more accurately delineate the historico-scientific interest of the site in relation to the discovery of vestiges of possible relevance , which requires extraordinary dedication. It is planned that this intervention will serve as a basis for making decisions about the future of the building and about the museum project that had been planned for this space, as well as about the archaeological site itself.

The work, which is being carried out by Baula, Archaeological Research, will last 6 weeks. These have a cost of 32,211.42 euros (VAT included) and in their financing the Girona City Council has the support of the Department of Culture of the Generalitat de Catalunya. The archaeological work will be carried out by a specialist team made up of six people from the company Baula, under the direction of archaeologist Àngela Gonzàlez. In the first phase of excavations, work was done on the interior of the existing wall, located in the western and northern sectors of the Casa Pastors.

The result was the discovery of several medieval and Roman architectural structures. Likewise, an analysis of the subsoil was carried out with georadar, the results of which are pending study. From all these excavations, a prescriptive report will be created to evaluate the results, which will be presented in 2024. The Casa Pastors is located inside the historic complex of Girona and has a high degree of protection. The building is located in front of Girona Cathedral, close to the old route of Via Augusta. In this place was the nerve center of Gerunda, the most important space in the political, cultural, religious and civic sphere of the ancient city.

At Casa Pastors there are remains of the Roman and medieval walls, of a medieval castle and a baroque palace, despite the heavy intervention involved in the rehabilitation of the building by the architect Pere Llimona in the early 1970s to house the Provincial Court, a function that the building had until 2008. It should be remembered that several archaeological excavation campaigns have been carried out at Casa Pastors by different archaeologists: Miquel Oliva and Mercè Ferrer (1971), Maribel Fuertes (2019), Anna Augé (2021) and Àngela Gonzàlez (2022).