Temple of Diana

It was not dedicated to Diana. The name was given to it in the 17th century by the historian Bernabé Moreno de Vargas, and the excavations begun in 1972 showed the temple belonged to the imperial cult: sculptures of members of the emperor's family turned up.

It survives so well precisely because somebody built inside it: in the 16th century the palace of the Count of Los Corbos was raised using the temple's cella as its frame, and those Renaissance walls held the Roman columns up for four centuries.

The palace embedded in the temple was built reusing Roman and Visigothic material, and its doorway, windows and double gallery are still there: in June 2018 an interpretation centre for the temple itself opened inside it.

The marble of the columns is a trick: they are coarse granite coated in stucco painted red to imitate marble. What is admired today as noble bareness was in fact the skeleton of a facing that has been lost.

The temple did not stand alone on a dry square: it occupied the centre of a landscaped sacred area with two pools running parallel on either side of the front, fed by small masonry channels covered with brick tiles.

The palace embedded in the temple was once condemned: in 1972 it was expropriated in order to recover the Roman building and an order was given to demolish it. The order was revoked, which is why it is still standing.

People did not call the palace after its count: it was the «House of the Miracles», the same nickname given to the aqueduct, and for the same reason — amazement that the thing was still there.

Presenting the surroundings was not without friction: at the request of associations and private individuals, members of ICOMOS-Spain visited the site and objected that the building raised around it encroaches on the temple's sacred area.