For historians, the urban phenomenon is a given and, in spite of its many versions and particularities across time and space, it is conceived as fundamentally invariable and is intuitively recognised. Therefore, unlike other social scientists, including sociologists and geographers, they have not paid particular attention to the definition of the city. For pre-and proto-historians, however, the profound, essential nature of the city is a basic question, as the early formation of towns is one of the central issues of their research. This has generated a large amount of scientific literature on the subject in the last decades. With this paper, we intend to contribute to the reflection on the nature of the city, and to define it in a way that may help identify and understand the protohistoric cities of Iberia and Mediterranean Gaul, if they did really exist.