Roman embankment on the Guadiana

Its most distinctive feature is the mass of buttresses reinforcing the face, and low down you can make out the mouths of old drainage conduits, which give away that the work did not only hold back the river: it also organised the discharge of the city's water into the channel. It is attributed to the 1st century BC, that is to the earliest years of the colony, which makes it one of the founding interventions on the river landscape, contemporary with the bridge itself.

Its interest is above all that of a piece of unmonumental civil engineering: while the bridge solved the crossing, the dyke solved the opposite problem, the river coming into the city. That it is still working as a retaining wall two millennia later says a good deal about the calculation behind it.

It can be walked freely along the Guadiana promenade, with no enclosure or opening hours, with the Roman bridge, the Alcazaba and the Morerías archaeological site a few metres away. Part of the Archaeological Ensemble of Mérida, World Heritage (UNESCO, 1993).