Roman around Conimbriga, we marvelled at mosaics and baths

Each tiny little square of ceramic – white, black, tan, brick red, greeny-bluish – isn’t much on its own but together they form beautiful mosaic images that are the highlight of Conimbriga, a Roman city ruin in central Portugal.

We had spied bits and pieces of structures the Romans left behind elsewhere in Portugual – aqueducts, roads and mile markers, baths, bridges, and a temple – but Conimbriga represented a more complete mosaic, tying it all together to give us a better feel for what it would have been like to live in a Roman city on the Empire’s fringe.

Said to be the best-preserved Roman site in Portugal, Conimbriga (pronounced Con-IM-breeg-ah) was built upon a previous Celtic hill fort and occupied by the Romans from about 139 BCE to 468 CE. At its peak, about 10,000 souls lived there, going about their daily tasks of gathering food, cooking, cleaning themselves in the heated baths, conducting business, defending their city, playing games, socializing, decorating their homes and selves, watering gardens, attending shows at the amphitheatre, and contemplating their spiritual world.

My eyes were drawn to the mosaics that stood in for carpets in the aristocratic homes. It struck me that those tiny tiles symbolize all our little experiences that combine to create the larger mosaic of who we are.

We began our visit in the museum, where my favourite artefact was the mosaic floor showing the Labyrinth of Crete in tiny tan and black tiles. At the centre, a not-so-scary Minotaur peeks out. The mosaic was unearthed in 1899 and the Minotaur still looks surprised to see visitors.

Other museum displays nicely illustrate what daily life had been like, with coins used to buy and sell food and pottery in the marketplace, jewelry, sculptures, tombstones, and many games and pastimes, including flutes and whistles, dice, and markers and counters for board games (one similar to backgammon).

My other favourite artefacts were the writing implements: inkpots, penknives, and several styluses presumably used for etching Latin words onto waxed tablets. Blog-writing would have been slow and not easily disseminated in those days.

The museum housed interesting displays about daily life in Conimbriga, including writing implements, funerary tombstones, toys and game pieces, and decorative stone carvings. One pottery shard shows a cross, from after Rome recognized Christianity in 391 CE.

It’s always a tough call at places like this – do you start with the museum and then see the archeological site outside, or vice versa? The museum had given us the air-conditioned details first, but that meant we were let loose into the ruins under the scorching midday sun. I refilled our water bottle and we set out.

As we approached the first section of ruins, I was stunned to see a mosaic dining room floor right out in the open, with no protection from sun or rain or sand-bearing winds that might damage them. And another. And then another. But then, they’ve survived pretty well since the Romans constructed them in the 1^st century CE, albeit with a few centuries of protection from being buried. (The House of Fountains, which was to come last on our tour, had a protective roof.)

We got as close as we could to the unprotected mosaics, then circled the many rooms, pointing and marvelling at the designs: flowers, swirls, vines, herringbones, knots, and even swastikas in the House of the Swastikas. Romans considered them a good luck sign – long before the Nazis co-opted the mark.

All the mosaic floors had a greyish tinge. I wanted to sweep them or throw a bucket of water over them to remove the dust and let their vibrancy shine forth.

While I loved the mosaics, Bill the engineer was fascinated by the Roman constructions, especially the mechanics of heating water and piping it around all the baths scattered across Conimbriga. In the House of Cantaber, he studied the hexagonal tanks that held heated water, other tanks that held cold water, and areas that had been furnaces.

Water came from three kilometres away, where the Romans built the Castellum de Alcabideque – a tower to capture and raise water (presumably from a spring) before it travelled through a large underground pipe to Conimbriga.

“Once the water got here, how did they pump it through the baths?” asked Bill. “It’d be easy today, but then…?” We couldn’t find any official explanations, so we were left to observe the stone tunnels and walls and tanks and guess the water’s route.

The House of Cantaber, built in the 1^st century CE, was really a mansion. At 35,090 square feet, it’s one of the largest Roman Empire houses ever discovered. Each of its five sections had a water garden with fountains and columns, and it was the only private residence with its own baths.

Baths were an essential part of Roman life, used not only for personal cleansing, but also as a social centre – a place to hang out, meet friends, negotiate business deals, discuss legal issues, and lobby for political votes. To think, the roots of our legal and political system, not to mention our language, probably evolved a good deal in Roman baths.

Most bathing complexes had multiple pools and rooms: a large cold-water pool (natation), main cold pool (frigidarium), tepid-water pool (tepidarium), and hot-water pool (caldarium). The laconicum was used for dry heat baths and the praefurnium housed the wood-burning furnace that heated the water.

“They spent a lot of time lounging around in water,” said Bill.

“I should have been a Roman,” I replied.

Apart from the big fancy houses with their mosaics and baths, there were dozens of homes for ordinary people, with their shops and stables and latrines all outlined by the low stone walls that remain. No mosaics or water gardens or personal baths for them.

Conimbriga became an important city because it sat strategically on the road between Lisbon and Braga (north of Porto). Given that most Portuguese cities are built on Roman foundations, it’s rather intriguing as to why Conimbriga didn’t become the base for cathedrals, grocery stores, and terra-cotta-roofed homes.

There’s a small Christian basilica, thought to have been built in the 6^th century CE, long after the Roman Empire fell. Christianity was legally recognized in the Roman Empire in 391 CE. Evidence of the “new” religion was found in some potsherds, a stamp to mark communion wafers, and the basilica.

We made the long hot trek across a field (presumably with more ruins buried beneath) to the largest of the public baths and the forum. Roman forums are marketplaces, the centre of any Roman city, where people would have traded their wheat, barley, olives, wine, dried and salted fish, pottery, jewelry and all those other artefacts we had seen in the museum.

Dominated by the temple supported by columns topped with leafy Corinthian capitals, the forum was the centre for commerce, but also law, religion, and politics. It was enlarged and renovated by successive rulers.

We passed several spots where the archeological digging continues. Only about 17 percent of Conimbriga has been uncovered, so there’s still lots more to discover.

As we circled back towards the entrance, we walked upon part of the Roman road. Usually four metres wide, sections of these highways that all lead to Rome can still be found all over Portugal. We could see the grooves worn into the stone cobbles by carriage wheels.

The road led through gates in the wall. As the Roman Empire began to decline in the late 300s, the Conimbrigians tore down some of the big houses, baths and the amphitheatre, and used the stone to build a honkin’ big wall to protect their city against the marauding Swabians, a Germanic Christian group. At 18 feet high and 9 feet wide, the wall may have worked for a time, but ultimately, the Swabians took Conimbriga from Roman control in 468 CE. The Swabians and then the Visigoths ruled for a time but, over the centuries, people moved away, buildings fell apart, farmers turned parts of the city into fields, and even Napoleon’s troops looted some of the stone monuments.

The recommended route through the ruins (which, confusingly, does not correspond to the order of information in the guidebook) saves the best for last: the aristocratic House of the Fountains. Part of the wall was built over it, but the rest is now under a protective roof. These ruins have the most spectacular mosaics and water gardens as well as mural paintings and even a latrine in the basement.

We gratefully stepped into the shaded house to the cooling sound of water jets amongst the gardens. Column bases made of stacked triangular bricks marched around the perimeter; they would have been covered with plaster and painted when a Roman family lived here and strolled around the pools.

But the mosaics were the pièce de resistance here. The first to greet us was Perseus holding Medusa’s bleeding head. We circled the house, pointing out various details in the mosaics to each other: men with dogs hunting deer, mythological beasts, the four seasons, flowers, twining vines, fish, a man with curly hair wearing a toga, hearts, waves, scallops, Templar-like crosses, Celtic-like knots, urns, goats, cats, horses, and a woman with big eyes – a nun or Madonna?

The House of the Fountains was so beautiful, we toured it again, seeing even more detail in the mosaics the second time round.

Conimbriga made me think of Spa Nordique – a favourite spa of mine in Chelsea, Quebec, Canada with hot, cold and tepid pools, just like the Romans. When archeologists excavate Spa Nordique or others of its ilk 2,000 years from now, will they also wonder how the water was pumped and heated? Will they muse about our archaic methods? “What, they used natural gas?! That ran out 1,800 years ago!”

It’s hard to go anywhere in Europe and not encounter bits of the Roman Empire left behind. History is so layered here, with each successive dominant power building upon the conquered. In Portugal, it’s generally Indigenous tribes and Celts on the bottom, then Roman, Swabians, Visigoths, Muslims, and Christians. Altogether, they form the mosaic that is Portugal today. And our visit to Conimbriga is one small tile in the mosaic of our own journeys.

Conimbriga helped us put into context the other Roman remains we’ve encountered throughout Portugal. We’ve seen aqueducts in Coimbra and Lisbon, roads in Porto de Mós and Conimbriga, mile marker XXVII in Peneda-Gerês National Park, baths and a temple in Evora, and a bridge somewhere along the Camino de Santiago.