The favourable geographic conditions of the southern cantons, and their mild climate, were factors that led to the area being populated by human beings at the very early date, already in the prehistorical era. There are quite a few sites which mark the different stages of the Paleolithic and Epipaleolithic periods. During the Neolithic period and the Bronze Age, different human communities ñwhose economic activity was characteristic of the period: agriculture and livestock found that the lands which now form the cantons of the Camp de Tarragona were an ideal setting. This settlement process came to an end with the territorial consolidation of the different tribes that made up the socio-political mosaic of the eastern areas of the Peninsula in pre-Roman times, as a direct consequence of the contact between those native groups with the various groups of Mediterranean colonisers (Phoenicians, Greeks and Carthaginians). The territory of the Camp de Tarragona was occupied by the Cesetan tribe, this being one of their most important settlements (Kese, may have been the area's capital and the immediate predecessor of the Roman city of Tarraco, now known as Tarragona).

In 218 BC, during the Second Punic War between Romans and Carthaginians, the Roman army under Cneus Cornelius Scipio disembarked at Emporion, a Greek colony allied to Rome. Simulataneously, Tarraco was founded, as the main winter base for the Roman troops in Hispania, thus beginning the long and complex process of the incorporation of Peninsula territory into the new political, cultural and economic order of the Romans, a process in which Tarraco was to play a vital role.

In the second half of the first century BC, it was granted colony status under Roman law, and was henceforth known as the colonia Iulia Urbs Triumphalis Tarraco. In the year 27 BC it was made the capital of the provincia Tarraconensis, as part ot the new provincial organisation carried out by Augustus. This emperor lived in Tarraco for two years, to follow the military operations which were taking place on the Cantabrian heights, and to direct his planned transformation of the world.

It was at that time that a programme was undertaken that was designed to endow the colony with an urbanistic and monumental infrastructure of outstanding quality, reflecting the city's importance and prestige.

This programme was maintained with considerable vitality until the middle of the third century AD. As a consequence of the general crisis, and with the first waves of Germanic invaders, a process of gradual demographic and urbanistic recession got underway. This resulted in the destruction and the abandoning of much of the city, apart from the higher districts which later became the city centre.

During this period, the loss of Tarraco's status as capital in favour of Tolosa (Toulouse) and then of Barcino (Barcelona), and finally (in the 6th century) of Toletum (Toledo), meant that city grew out of touch with the decisive political centres of the period. This distancing process did not lessen its urban importance, based on its status as an ecclesiastical metropolitan see, and on the continued use of its port infrastructure until the arrival of the Muslims in the city in 713-714. This event heralded the city's definitive entry into the so-called Middle Ages.