Roman farmstead at Cerro de las Palomas
A Roman rural settlement on the Cerro de las Palomas, in the northern sector of the municipality of Mérida. It is recognised from the quantity of building material scattered on the surface and, among it, from what appear to be the remains of a bath suite — the feature that sets it apart from most of the rural sites catalogued in the area.
- Type
- Villa
- Preservation
- Surface finds
- Protection
- Inventoried · Nivel B-36
- Coordinates
- 39.03194, -6.35833
- Photographs
- 0
What it is and what is left
The presence of baths matters: it suggests this was not a plain farm but an establishment with a pars urbana, a villa with quarters of some standing, of the kind that dotted the territory of Augusta Emerita, making the most of the fertile floodplain and the network of roads leaving the Lusitanian capital.
The reference is V. Navarro del Castillo's Historia de Mérida y de los pueblos de su comarca (1972), taken up in the municipal archaeological survey. There is no published excavation, so the extent, plan and precise date of the site remain undetermined, and the identification of the baths is a reading from the surface. Location approximate.
What each period left here
It reads downwards: each band is a period with fabric in this site, newest first, deepest last.
0 facts
0 photographs
Roman
This site has fabric from this period. Mérida has 57 more sites built in the same layer.
See the whole layer →Below the deepest layer of each site is the ground itself: what has not been excavated yet, or what left nothing built. The catalogue only claims what is documented.
A short walk from here
Straight-line distances, worked out from the coordinates of each site.