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Now open · Launched 1 July 2026

The Roar of Tarraco

Two thousand years ago, this arena was full. Step back in.

Free-roam MR · Ages 7+ · 12 minutes Roman Amphitheatre of Tarragona · UNESCO World Heritage
Discover the experience

The story

The premise.

The amphitheatre of Tarraco held twelve thousand people. Standing in it today, you can still feel that. We gave it back its crowd.

The Roar of Tarraco is our first free-roam Mixed Reality experience deployed inside a UNESCO World Heritage site. Visitors walk onto the real arena floor, put on a headset, and the ruin rebuilds around them: tiers of stone rise back to full height, the awning stretches overhead, and the seats fill with a Roman crowd that reacts to what happens below. Over ten minutes they learn how the building worked, who came here, and what a day of games actually sounded like — standing on the same stones the whole time.

Built with the historians and archaeologists of the Ajuntament de Tarragona, who are responsible for the site. Nothing is invented for spectacle: the reconstruction follows the archaeological record, and the fiction sits on top of it.

Key data

The numbers behind the experience.

12 min
Duration
Per session, inside the arena
+9/10
Customer feedback
Average visitor rating
Ages 7+
Designed for
Families, schools and visitors
5 lang
Multilingual
CAT · ESP · EN · FR · IT

Watch the experience

Welcome to The Roar of Tarraco

Inside the experience

A ruin, rebuilt around you.

You arrive as a novicius — an apprentice gladiator on his first day — and Marcus Valerius Mesala, the magistrate paying for the games, takes you through the arena before the crowd arrives. The site itself stays exactly as it is. Everything added to it exists only in the headset.

The Roman amphitheatre of Tarragona, half in surviving stone and half reconstructed digitally
“Before Tarraco roars again.” You come out of the tunnel onto the real arena floor and are told to stop and take in the scale of the place. Then the stone starts to climb: tiers, podium wall and awning return to full height around you, registered to the surviving remains metre for metre. You keep walking on the real sand the whole time — only the building above it changes.
Visitors wearing mixed reality headsets watching a gladiator combat recreated inside the amphitheatre
Where you sit is who you are. Mesala reads the amphitheatre back to you as a social map: the plebs at the top, loud and impatient, where a gladiator looks like an ant with a sword; the merchants and property owners of the media cavea in their best tunic, hoping someone important sees them; and in the front row the magistrates, priests and powerful families, with their names cut into the stone so nobody takes their seat.
Two gladiators facing each other on the arena sand in front of a full amphitheatre
Vita or iugula. “People of Tarraco!” The munera open a few metres from where you stand, close enough to hear the breathing. One fighter is left standing, the other at the mercy of the tiers — and the verdict belongs to the crowd, not to you. Helmet, greaves, shield and curved blade follow the equipment types documented for provincial arenas.
A painted podium in the arena carrying a Roman inscription, with a magistrate in a toga addressing the crowd from above it
The man whose name is on the day. Marcus Valerius Mesala, Editor Muneris of Tarraco, is no neutral guide. He stages the games for the people and for his own memory: if Tarraco remembers this day, Rome will hear his name. He speaks to you from above the podium wall — three metres of it, he points out, so not even the most ambitious lion reaches the seats — where the longest inscription in the Roman empire runs across the stone, dedicated to the emperor Elagabalus.

How we built it

From first site visit
to opening day.

Working inside a protected monument adds one constraint above all others: leave no trace. Every stage below was run with the site's archaeologists in the room.

Total delivery 22 weeks
Designed for wonder. Delivered in under six months.
  1. 01 · Consultation
    Week 1–3

    Archaeological briefing with the Ajuntament de Tarragona. Conservation limits agreed before a single design decision: no fixings, no floor loads, no permanent installation.

  2. 02 · Story & script
    Week 4–9

    Narrative written with historians and storytellers, then reviewed line by line against the record. Five-language script development in parallel.

  3. 03 · Survey & reconstruction
    Week 10–20

    Millimetre scan of the standing remains, then a full CGI reconstruction registered to it — so the virtual amphitheatre lands exactly on the real one as the visitor walks.

  4. 04 · On-site build
    Week 21–25

    Reversible hardware install, tracking calibration across an open-air ruin in changing daylight, and training for the site's own front-of-house staff.

  5. 05 · Launch
    1 July 2026

    Opened to the public alongside the standard amphitheatre ticket, with a combined pack and a dedicated programme for school groups.

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like this to your site.

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