Ull de Basilisc

The tunnel called “Ull del Basilisc” is located in the subsoil of the town hall square of Puigcerdà. The interventions were promoted by the municipal council of Puigcerdà and funded jointly with the Diputació de Girona. The main goal of the excavation was the decommissioning and recovery of the levels of circulation. The digging took place between the years 2015 and the beginning of 2017 and was led by the archaeologists Oriol Achón and Júlia Miquel.

It consists on a gallery of about 30 meters in length with walls built with blocks of stone that are hardly tied with lime mortar with a cover made of large rectangular granite blocks. The gallery leads to a large room that was converted into an ice well. The archaeological tasks consisted in cleaning the collapsed sections, documenting a pebble floor and excavating the interior of the room. In this space remains of two walls that supported the wooden beams dividing the space vertically by the ice blocks were found. In the excavation seven evolutionary phases were established from the 13th-14th centuries until the collapse of the tunnel between 1986 and 1988.