When Experts Dug Up These Spanish Dunes, A Startling Ancient Secret Emerged From The Sand

Naturally, local residents are just as stunned as the archaeologists themselves. With its stunning ocean views, the Caños de Meca beach at Cape Trafalgar has been a favorite location for seaside walks for years. But no one had known for sure what lay buried in the sand just below their feet. Once they found out, those relaxed strolls took on a whole new dimension. 

Exquisitely preserved as the Roman remains are, they are far from the oldest signs of human habitation uncovered around this site. Equally exciting is yet another find within 500 yards of the ancient building. There’s clear evidence of human activity during the Bronze Age, long predating the time that Romans conquered and lived in Spain. 

But it was the Roman archaeology which most excited the experts. As Professor Dario Bernal of the University of Cádiz archaeology department told news agency La Prensa Latina in May 2021, “It is a structure that has an exceptional state of conservation for the Iberian Peninsula and the western Mediterranean in general.”

Of course the name “Trafalgar” already has an esteemed place in the pages of history, especially if you happen to be British. For it was off this cape that the Battle of Trafalgar was fought in 1805. Even today, it’s one of the proudest episodes in the history of Britain’s Royal Navy. For in this great naval battle Admiral Nelson’s 27-strong fleet defeated 33 French and Spanish ships during the Napoleonic Wars.

The Battle of Trafalgar cemented Horatio Nelson’s place in British legend. He lost his own life as his fleet defeated Bonaparte’s French and Spanish ships. But the history that Professor Bernal and his colleagues uncovered in the sands of Cape Trafalgar long preceded the story of Nelson and his victory in the Atlantic. There’s a matter of a couple of thousand years and more difference. 

Excitement about these extraordinary Roman and Bronze Age finds even extended to local politicians. The Andalusian minister for culture, an enthusiastic Patricia del Pozo, told CNN, “It is wonderful.” And she pointed out that the evidence uncovered by the archaeologists showed that Cape Trafalgar was “an incredibly attractive area for all types of civilizations, which endows us with incredible history.”

One thing that historians already knew about Cape Trafalgar in Roman times was that it was an important location for the production of fish sauce and other marine food products. Indeed, at first the archaeologists speculated that they might have stumbled across the remains of fishery pools. That was because they first uncovered what looked like a low wall, about a foot high, from the dunes.

The researchers assumed this low wall must be the enclosure of a cetaria. That was a pool the Romans built to keep juvenile fish in while they fattened them up for the table. It would have been connected to the sea, and since the Atlantic was so close by, the archaeologist’s assumption made sense. But as they excavated further and deeper, they soon realized their mistake. 

The University of Cádiz archaeological research project at Cape Trafalgar is titled Arqueostra. The researchers are specifically looking for historical evidence of the extensive fishing and seafood processing industries that the Romans ran in Spain. And the project had already found seven salting pools from the Roman era at a separate site nearby.

These pools, up to 6.5 feet deep, would have been used as a kind of ancient fridge, preserving foodstuffs including fish and other marine animals such as shrimp. It’s also highly likely that workers there were concocting an ancient fish sauce called garum. Material found in the pools has been linked to the manufacture of this condiment.

Garum was a particular delicacy of the era. Or so the Romans thought: modern palates might not agree that this pungent condiment was delicious. The sauce was made by fermenting fish guts in herbs and salt and even some Romans found it distinctly unpleasant. Salon quotes Pliny the Elder who described garum as a “secretion of putrefying matter,” which hardly sounds appetizing.

But Pliny, who was killed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79, did have some positive things to say about garum. In his only surviving work, Natural History, he wrote that the fish sauce was a go-to remedy for dysentery, and could alleviate dog bites as well as easing earache. Additionally, eating African snails soaked in garum was a sure-fire cure for stomach troubles. We’ll probably stick with modern medicine.

Whatever Pliny thought, this fish sauce was immensely popular throughout the Roman Empire with citizens splashing it onto all kinds of savory dishes. For modern Westerners, ketchup is probably the nearest equivalent. Finding the fish fermenting pools at Cape Trafalgar was not a great surprise, since this part of Spain was a major producer of garum, which was exported throughout the Roman Empire.

But it wasn’t just in Roman Spain that this fish sauce was brewed up, it was also manufactured in the Eastern Mediterranean. Evidence for this appeared in 2018 when archaeologists discovered a fish sauce factory near the modern Israeli city of Ashkelon. This processing plant dates back to the first century A.D. and the researchers found huge vats and storage jars that would have been used in the garum-making process.

But as we’ve said, although the discovery of those fish ponds was a welcome breakthrough for the University of Cádiz team, it was far from the only discovery that they made. In fact, there were three sites within a 500-yard area beneath the sand dunes of Cape Trafalgar that revealed some of the fascinating history of this area.

As well as the garum fermenting tanks and the site that researchers first thought was a Roman fish pond, there was another find that long predated the time of the Romans in Spain. These empire-builders first conquered parts of what is now modern Spain in 207-206 B.C. That was when the Roman general Scipio Africanus drove the Carthaginians from the eastern part of the Iberian Peninsula.

But this second of the three major finds uncovered by Professor Bernal and his team dated back some 4,000 years. Like the other two finds, both Roman, this third find was within some 500 yards of Cape Trafalgar’s lighthouse. The cape is about seven miles west of the nearest city, Barbate.  

Speaking to the Paudal website, Bernal pointed out, “Barbate barely had archaeological remains and now it has prehistoric and Roman remains.” So what was this prehistoric discovery? It was a tomb from the Bronze Age. One of Bernal’s colleagues, Professor Eduardo Vijande Vila, told Spanish press agency EFE, “They must have felt that it was a special place to bury their loved ones.”

Certainly, this stretch of Spain’s Atlantic coast features dramatic scenery, with its rolling dunes overlooking the ocean swell. You could say it was a good place to gaze at eternity. The site consists of a passage that had been carved from bare rock and led to a burial chamber about 10 feet below the surface. A complete female skeleton was interred in the tomb.

The woman’s grave contained various valuables including green beads and shells which would have been part of a necklace and a bone comb. There were also two earrings made of gold. The archaeologists also discovered an ossuary, a place for storing human bones, in the passageway leading to the circular burial chamber. 

All of the remains were exceptionally well-preserved and the tomb appears to have remained undisturbed since those prehistoric people were laid to rest there. Another of Bernal’s University of Cádiz colleagues, Juan Jesús Cantillo, theorized that the woman in the chamber would have been the last individual placed in the tomb. After her burial it was likely sealed up.

Cantillo has also speculated that there are likely to be other as-yet-undiscovered tombs in the area that surrounds Cape Trafalgar. He told the Paudal website, “This has to be a funerary complex.” His colleague Dr. Vijande Vila said that experts would now analyze the human remains to determine the familial relationships of the deceased. They will also hope to identify the type of food these Bronze Age individuals consumed.

So as we’ve seen, there have actually been three important discoveries in this small area around Cape Trafalgar. There are the seven salting pools where garum was likely made. Then there is the Bronze Age tomb, startling in its exceptional preservation. What is the third discovery? In fact, it is the most spectacular of all.

It’s from the Roman era and it’s not far from the site of that megalithic tomb. A set of Roman baths emerged from the sand dunes, spectacularly well-preserved. You’ll remember that the researchers thought they’d found a fishery pool when low walls emerged from the sand. But as they dug down, a far grander structure appeared.

We’ve already noted how Professor Bernal has waxed lyrical about the “exceptional state of conservation” of these ruins. Other Roman bath complexes found in Spain have largely consisted of nothing more than the skeletal shell of the structure. But the extensive remains Bernal and his colleagues had discovered were much more than mere foundations.

The structure uncovered by the University of Cádiz team rises to a height of about 13 feet. It consists of walls still with their window openings and doorways. So far only two of the rooms of the public baths have been excavated but researchers believe the complex would have covered an area of between 2 and 3 acres.

The baths would have been kept toasty by a furnace that pumped out hot air, which would have circulated around the baths warming the walls and providing under-floor heating. Stucco and marble colored black, white and red found in the two excavated rooms suggest that the baths were elaborately decorated.

These public baths were likely patronized by the workers who toiled at the nearby fish-fattening ponds as well as at the fish sauce factory. You can well imagine that after a hard day’s work fermenting fish guts, anyone would be glad of a refreshing bath. Actually we can speculate that the garum-makers’ friends and families would have flat-out insisted that they had washed thoroughly after a day by the fish vats. 

This discovery of an extensive Roman baths complex also has important ramifications for our understanding of the Roman period in this part of the Iberian peninsula. Previously, it was thought that this had been a relatively unimportant and far-flung part of the sprawling Roman Empire, but finding public baths this large and sophisticated could prompt a rethink.

Public baths, after all, were a central part of Roman life. And the presence of this 2,000-year-old complex at Cape Trafalgar would suggest the area was actually regarded as an key part of the empire. The Romans called their baths thermae and they were actually much more than just a place to wash. They also were regarded as an important social center and somewhere that you went to relax.

Roman baths generally followed a pattern. They were built in a spacious garden and the central bath houses would be set among the greenery. There would be three main chambers, the tepidarium, the calidarium and the frigidarium. As you might have guessed, the first of those chambers was warm and the second hot, while the last was where you took a bracing cold dip to round things off.

There were also other rooms with different functions in the standard Roman bath house. After undressing the bather would be anointed with oil in the unctuarium. There was also a steam room which was called the laconicum or sudatorium and there the oil and sweat would be scraped from your skin using a special tool, the strigil. The bathing ritual was topped off with a final anointing of oil.

In the normal run of events, bathing was a single-sex affair. But according to Encyclopedia Britannica, a fashion for mixed bathing did start in the first century A.D. All the same, this was a practice confined mainly to the wealthy classes and it seems that most ordinary folk found it more than a little shocking.

So thanks to the excavations by Professor Bernal and his colleagues we know more about the lives of the people who lived around Cape Trafalgar 2,000 years ago. They were lucky enough to have had access to one of Roman civilization’s greatest luxuries. And these bathing facilities would have doubtless been highly prized by the good people who worked at the nearby fish farms and garum factories.

According to the website of La Prensa Latina, the nearest Roman city to Cape Trafalgar was Baelo Claudia, about 15 miles away. It was especially renowned for its garum sauce, which as already noted was consumed across the Roman Empire. So it seems that this whole region of Spain was a center for the manufacture of the indispensable sauce. But how had this part of the Iberian Peninsula become so important to the Romans?

As we saw earlier, the Romans arrived along the eastern coast of the Iberian Peninsula after they’d dislodged the former rulers, the Carthaginians, just at the end of the third century B.C. Today Cape Trafalgar lies in the Spanish province of Cádiz, part of the region of Andalusia. In Roman times this area was called Baetica.

According to the Oxford Classical Dictionary, this enclave was one of the wealthiest parts of the western section of the Roman Empire. Its prosperity was built on exports of precious metals and olive oil. And of course that other highly valuable commodity, stinking fish sauce, also played a key part in Baetica’s apparently thriving economy.

So the excavations by the University of Cádiz team in 2020 have neatly encapsulated a large section of Andalusia’s ancient history in a 500-yard area just around Cape Trafalgar. First, there is the Bronze Age burial site showing that humans have lived here for at least 4,000 years. Then, some 2,000 years later come the two Roman sites, the fish sauce factory and the baths.

Perhaps the fact that the public baths and the fish sauce factory are close together is mere coincidence. But we can speculate that building a public baths not far from an industry that must have been at best unpleasantly smelly was a far-sighted piece of planning. In any case we know that if we’d been garum workers back in the day, we’d have been heartily grateful that a bath house was so near our workplace!