Huesca (Aragonese: Uesca, Catalan: Osca), officially Huesca/Uesca, is a province of northeastern Spain, in northern Aragon. The capital is Huesca.
Positioned just south of the central Pyrenees, Huesca borders France and the French Departments of Pyrénées-Atlantiques and Hautes-Pyrénées. Within Spain, Huesca's neighboring provinces are Navarre, Zaragoza and Lleida.
Covering a primarily mountainous area of 15,626 km², the province of Huesca has a total population of 228,566 (in 2010), with almost a quarter of its people living in the capital city of Huesca. The low population density, 14.62/km², has meant that Huesca's lush valleys, rivers, and lofty mountain ranges have remained relatively pristine and unspoiled by progress.
Home to majestic scenery, the tallest mountain in the Pyrenees, the Aneto; eternal glaciers, such as at Monte Perdido; and the National Park of Ordesa and Monte Perdido, rich in flora and protected fauna. Popular with mountaineers, spelunkers, paragliders, and white water rafters it is also a popular snow skiing destination with notable resorts in Candanchú, Formigal, Astún, Panticosa and Cerler.
Huesca (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈweska]; Aragonese: Uesca) is a city in north-eastern Spain, within the autonomous community of Aragon. It is also the capital of the Spanish province of the same name and the comarca of Hoya de Huesca. In 2009 it had a population of 52,059, almost a quarter of the total population of the province. That makes it one of the least populated provincial capitals in Spain.
Huesca celebrates its main festivities Fiestas de San Lorenzo from 9 to 15 August.
Huesca's pre-Roman Iberian name was Bolskan. It was the capital of the Vescetani, in the north of Hispania Tarraconensis, on the road from Tarraco (modern Tarragona) and Ilerda (modern Lleida) to Caesaraugusta (modern Zaragoza) and fell under Caesaraugusta's jurisdiction. Pliny alone places the Oscenses in Vescitania, a district mentioned nowhere else. The city's name was rendered as Osca, and was a Roman colony, Urbs Victrix Osca, during the Roman Empire. Under the impetus of Quintus Sertorius, the renegade Roman and Iberian hero who made Osca his base, the city minted its own coinage and was the site of a prestigious school founded by Sertorius to educate young Iberians in Latin and Romanitas in general. We learn from Plutarch that it was a large town, and the place where Sertorius died. It is probably the town called Ileoscan (Ἰλεόσκαν) by Strabo, in an apparently corrupt passage. It seems to have possessed silver mines, unless the argentum Oscense here mentioned merely refers to the minted silver of the town.
Huesca is one of the 52 electoral districts (circunscripciones) used for the Spanish Congress of Deputies - the lower chamber of the Spanish Parliament, the Cortes Generales. It is one of the three electoral districts which correspond to the provinces of Aragon. Huesca is the largest municipality although it only has 38,000 voters. There are no other municipalities with electorates over 10,000. Like the other Aragonese provinces Teruel and Zaragoza, Huesca has been a political Bellwether as the party that has won most seats in the district has gone on to form the government.
Under Article 68 of the Spanish constitution the boundaries must be the same as the province of Huesca and under Article 140 this can only be altered with the approval of congress. Voting is on the basis of universal suffrage in a secret ballot. The electoral system used is closed list proportional representation with seats allocated using the D'Hondt method. Only lists which poll 3% or more of all valid votes cast, including votes "en blanco" i.e. for "none of the above" can be considered for seats. Under article 12 of the constitution, the minimum voting age is 18.