Proceedings of the 12th International INQUA meeting on paleoseismology, active tectonic and archaeoseismology

the first archaeoseismological studies at the Roman site of Baelo Claudia (e.g. Silva et al., 2005), the analysis of ancient earthquakes in Spain has been progressively growing, incorporating events from different chronology, including Neolithic, Bronze Age, Phoenician, Ibero-Roman periods and the Middle Age. The recent revision of the Spanish Seismic Database under the light of the EMS98 scale (Udias, 2015) resulted in the removal of nearly all earthquakes previous the 10th Century CE. This has generated an “artificial aseismic scenario” for Spain depleted of both, previously catalogued historical events and newly reported ancient earthquakes (Silva, 2019). The incorporation of ancient earthquakes to the official catalogues coming from archaeoseismic research, is thus a mandatory scientific effort to full-fill the seismic history of Spain. This paper summarizes the state of the art and cataloguing of ancient events recorded in the Iberian Peninsula to the date. To avoid a large list of references we mainly refer to the most recent or essential key-works and to the “Spanish Catalogue of Geological Effects of Earthquakes” (Silva et al., 2019), where a complete reference list is available for most of the studied events. Fig. 1: Map showing the location and relative size of ancient earthquakes studied in Spain till the year 2023. Main fault traces highlighted by red lines. Updated from the Spanish Catalogue of Geological Effects of Earthquakes (Silva, 2019)