La Paeria is Lleida's city hall, one of the finest Gothic civic buildings in Catalonia. Built in the thirteenth century when the city was prosperous and self-governing, its façade on the main square is a confident statement of medieval municipal authority: arched arcade at street level, Gothic windows above, stone carved with coats of arms and decorative detail. It is still the working city hall today.
The interior can sometimes be visited and contains a medieval crypt that may have served as a prison in earlier centuries. Even if access is limited, the building is worth examining from the square outside — it speaks to a moment in Lleida's history when the city was a significant regional power, before the wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries ground it down.