House of the Fountains (Casa dos Repuxos)

HouseLusitania · Condeixa-a-Velha, PortugalBuilt 160 CE · Destroyed 300 CE

Not standing in 117 CE

About

The single most photographed house at Conimbriga — a mansion built around a formal garden threaded with fountain jets, its floors covered in some of the finest figural mosaics in Roman Iberia. A genuine dating trap: a plainer house occupied this plot from the early 1st century CE, but the fountain garden and famous mosaics that define the 'House of the Fountains' are dated by Portuguese excavation scholarship (Correia et al.) to the third quarter of the 2nd century through the early 3rd century CE — decades after Hadrian's accession, with some tourist sources pushing it as late as the Severan period. No reading puts the celebrated mansion before 117 CE. It was itself demolished, along with much of this quarter, when the town's defensive wall went up around 300 CE.

What happened here

The front door opens onto a corridor and then a roofed hall with a pool under an opening in the roof, and that hall is a public room — clients arrive at dawn to greet the owner, and the whole plan is arranged so they can be received and impressed. Behind it, a colonnaded garden with a dining room off it, three couches around a low table, guests reclining on the left elbow. Rooms are small, dark and multi-purpose; furniture is moved as needed. Walls are painted to open the space out with fake architecture and landscapes. Windows are shuttered rather than glazed. Cooking, laundry and the slaves' quarters are pushed to the edges. Street frontage is let out as shops, because it is too valuable to waste.