Roman dam of Araya
A Roman gravity dam with buttresses, preserved at the Cortijo de Araya, north-west of Mérida, beside the buildings of the Roman villa of the same name. It is one of the minor hydraulic works in the territory of Augusta Emerita: while the great dams of Proserpina and Cornalvo supplied the city, dams like this one served specific farms, regulating the water of a stream for irrigation and for the estate's own use.
- Type
- Presa / embalse romano
- Preservation
- Ruined
- Protection
- Inventoried · Nivel B-30
- Coordinates
- 38.94306, -6.39167
- Photographs
- 0
What it is and what is left
The building type — a gravity wall reinforced with buttresses on the downstream face — recurs in the Roman dams of the middle Guadiana valley and was studied by José María Álvarez Martínez in a specific paper of 1975 and by Fernández Ordóñez in his repertory of Roman dams in Spain.
Beside the dam, the walls and the bathing rooms of the associated settlement's baths are visible, along with other rooms of the residential part, and its cemetery is known as well. This point should not be confused with the page for the Roman villa of Araya, which records the settlement: what is recorded here is the hydraulic work. 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.