Castro of Baroña
Castro de Baroña
Interesting facts
- Fragments of amphorae found at the site may be Punic, hinting that Mediterranean goods reached this remote Atlantic headland.
- The fort was already noted in the mid-eighteenth century by the Benedictine scholar Martín Sarmiento, in writings from 1754–55.
- Shell middens show the villagers ate limpets, mussels and sea snails, and kept pigs as well as cattle, sheep and goats.
- Remains of furnaces and spindle whorls reveal that metal was smelted and yarn spun inside the walls.
- The first excavation, in 1933, was led by Sebastián González García; Francisco Calo Lourido and Teresa Soeiro dug again in 1980–84.
- A new programme of excavation and restoration began on 21 May 2012 and continued into 2015.
- The Xunta de Galicia declared the castro a Bien de Interés Cultural, Spain's top heritage protection, in 2011.
Why it is worth it
The Castro de Baroña is an Iron Age hillfort set on a small rocky peninsula on the Atlantic coast of Galicia, in the parish of Baroña in the municipality of Porto do Son. The site was lived in from roughly the 1st century BC to the 1st century AD, and its position is the first thing that strikes a visitor: a knot of granite rock almost cut off by the sea, with the ocean breaking on three sides and only a thin neck of land tying it to the shore.
The defences are still easy to read. A ditch about four metres wide and three deep was cut across the isthmus, followed by a rampart built as two roughly parallel stone walls packed with sand and rubble. The main wall, well preserved, guards an entrance that narrows beside the footing of a tower, as if built to stop carts. Inside, around twenty round and oval stone houses survive, arranged in separate sectors on terraces. A flight of stone steps linking two of these areas is considered the best preserved of any Galician castro, and one building with a hearth, a post-hole and pottery may have served as a forge.
The inhabitants seem to have been largely self-sufficient, though there was no spring or well inside the walls and water had to be carried in. Their diet came mostly from the sea, shellfish and fish, supplemented by cattle, sheep, goats and acorns, and finds point to metalworking, stonework and weaving on site. The fort was first excavated in 1933, with later campaigns in 1969–1970 and the 1980s, when the structures were also consolidated. Standing among the round house foundations with the Atlantic on all sides gives a rare sense of how the castro culture of north-west Iberia lived with the ocean.
Getting there
The castro is on the coast of Porto do Son, in the province of A Coruña. The nearest larger town is Santa Uxía de Ribeira, about 16 km away. The nearest airport is Vigo Airport (VGO), about 61 km away in a straight line. Access to the site itself is free.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Castro de Baroña is an Iron Age fortified settlement located in the parish of Baroña, a municipality of Porto do Son in the province of A Coruña. The settlement, surrounded by two walls and containing twenty roundhouses that still remain today, was built on a peninsula and inhabited from the 1st century BC to the 1st century AD.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0
42.69494, -9.03222per Wikidata