Los Bodegones necropolis
A Roman funerary area known since the 17th century by the popular name of Los Bodegones, which still designates this part of the Mérida suburb. It is the first group of tombs in the city for which a topographical description survives, rather than a passing mention of stray finds.
- Type
- Necropolis
- Preservation
- —
- Protection
- —
- Coordinates
- 38.91086, -6.33596
- Photographs
- 0
What it is and what is left
We owe it to Bernabé Moreno de Vargas, who in his Historia de Mérida (1633) wrote that outside the city there were some notable burials and tombs which common people called bodegones, some twenty-four of them, and that they were vaults built of small stone and mortar, smooth inside; he even noted their dimensions, between six and eight varas long, and observed that they kept no order or relation to one another, because each man built his burial as he saw fit. He read them as suggrundaria, graves intended mainly for children, though adults of leading families were buried in them too.
In today's terms these are semi-underground mausolea vaulted in opus caementicium, the same building type that survives standing in the Columbarios funerary area, a few hundred metres to the west. The group formed part of the belt of cemeteries spreading through the southern and eastern suburb of the colony, organised along the roads out of town.
Nothing is left to see: the sector is built over and the name survives only as a neighbourhood place name. Its interest is as much historiographical as archaeological, being the documentary starting point for the study of the funerary world of Mérida. (Location approximate, based on the present-day place name.)
What each period left here
It reads downwards: each band is a period with fabric in this site, newest first, deepest last.
1 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 →The funerary buildings of this sector are also called the «tinsmith's cave» because in the middle decades of the 20th century a family of tinsmiths lived inside one of these Roman tombs.
Consorcio Ciudad Monumental de MéridaBelow 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.