Facelift for the Jewish old quarter of Tortosa

Tortosa (ACN).- The Ebro Delta city has recovered part of its Jewish heritage, renovating the old Jewish quarter. In addition, with this initiative, the city wants to attract Jewish tourism which visits Catalonia. Jewish tourism, and particularly Sephardic, is a potential market that the five Catalan municipalities integrated in the 'Jewish Network' want to exploit. Tortosa, the town that holds the presidency of the association, has carried out a program with the aim of making a tourism asset from a network made up of five municipalities: Barcelona, Girona, Besalú and Castelló d'Empúries. In fact, the Provincial and the City Councils of Girona are already working on a direct flight to Tel Aviv.

“It's a community with a potential for tourism”, said the Mayor of Tortosa, Ferran Bel. In addition, despite being aware that the city would not attract Jewish tourism only by itself, Tortosa wants to form part of five Catalan cities integrated in the ‘Jewish Network’, as well as other towns in Aragon or Navarre. Bel said “this tourism moves from the USA or South America and comes to 'Sepharad', what for them is the whole Peninsula. They clearly won't visit the 23 cities that make up the 'Jewish Network', but they will visit more than one, and here we have an offer mainly focused on the Barcelona and Girona Jewish quarters", he added. Now Tortosa also wants to be on the visitors’ to-see list.

This type of high purchasing power tourism also leads to getting to know the territory and, in that sense, can benefit Tortosa and the Ebro area. The peculiarity of this type of tourism is the necessary agreements with the restaurant, accommodation and entertainment industries to find, for instance, menus of Sephardic origin, recipes from Jewish culture, and Kosher food. Currently, the Tortosa Parador Hotel is attached to this program and two or three restaurants will be joining soon.

To attract Jewish tourism, Tortosa has made a cleaning and adjustment of the call, unifying the colors of streets and houses and white and gray, and renewing the call signaling about streets and historical and significant buildings, such as the synagogue, the pottery or the now defunct butcher shop or bakery. These signs come with an explanation in Catalan, Spanish and English. Also, some leaflets with explanations about the history of the call and the route to follow have been published.

Jews might have lived in Tortosa during Roman times

The Jewish community is considered one of the oldest in the Iberian Peninsula. Although their presence is not documented until the sixth century, the dating of a trilingual tombstone inscription -Greek, Hebrew and Latin- suggests that Jews lived in Tortosa in the Roman times. However, their presence in the city is particularly evident between the eight and thirteenth centuries, partly because of the city’s frontier location and commercial tradition.