Rock & Roman Ruins

 Rock & Roman Ruins- Baelo Claudia

 

 

There are plenty of unvisited places that one feels one knows anyway, because they have become cultural, historical or geographic cliches, always present in image and report. Some will inevitably disappoint upon actual acquaintance.

 

Two such cliches of place for me are Gibraltar (the “Rock”) and its stretch of sea between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, the Straits of Gibraltar, where Africa and Europe come close. Everyone knows Gibraltar, the stalwart bit of Britain (bobbies and red post boxes) stuck on to the edge of grumpy Spain, one of the last remnants of imperial and naval domination; and everyone knows that the Straits are a strategic bottleneck for shipping, and easy passage for drug or people smuggling boats.

 

(Any nationalist nostalgia inspired by Gibraltar has to be tempered by the fact that 96% of its inhabitants voted to Remain in the 2016 EU referendum.)

 

I had a mental image of Gibraltar , less so of the Straits. The actual sight of both inspired awe. First, there was the leader on our bus (hired for the trip) suddenly announcing: “If you’re wondering about that big dark cloud in the distance, that’s Gibraltar”. So it was – an abrupt, huge, sombre mass rising up in utter disproportion to the adjacent nondescript coastal plain and the nondescript Spanish industrial town sprawling thereon.

 

And there, not in the distance, was the high coastline of Africa. From a mirador just past Gibraltar one can look out across a lush green Spanish slope to this mysterious shadowed place some 8 miles away. A goose-bumpy moment when one thinks of all the vastness behind that view.

 

All this was an added bonus to our trip, which was headed to the site of a small Roman town, Baelo Claudia. “Site of Roman ruins” is a generic place of the kind I’ve initially described. Suddenly and cataclysmically preserved places like Pompeii are paradigms of a different sort; but most sites are something of a jumble of low walls and floors, where, if you are not an expert, it is difficult to imagine the built original, however much you admire the surviving mosaics and hypocausts.

 

Baelo Claudio is different. Its layout, on a seaward slope, ending these days in a sandy beach, is easily grasped and its original forms easily imagined.

 

It was a seaside town, a port and a fish processing place, about 500m from top to bottom, and 300m wide. Walls, location of gates and one aqueduct are still obvious, as are the two main streets splitting the town from north to south and east to west. Indeed, extensive stretches of the paving of the latter are still to be walked on.

 

A small town then, with a port area ( the shipping infrastructure no longer apparent) slightly separated from the rest, but containing the detailed remains of the factories that turned fish into the highly prized fish sauce, or garum.

 

Turning away from the sea, there’s the view of the Forum, the Basilica (law court) temple altars and a bulky theatre. This small town, in addition to its commercial activity, was a cultural and administrative centre, with its capacious theatre, law court and religious structures. Indeed, it was granted important civic status by the Emperor Claudius.

 

Therefore one must imagine that it was the regional town, with jurisdiction over outlying villages, farms and villas, and the place where country folk came for their markets, official encounters and entertainment (not to forget those travelling through to take ship to nearby Africa).

 

Baelo Claudia readily gives up its history to the visitor. A very special ruin.

 

April 2023