Sexi Firmum Iulium

About

Garum from this Phoenician-founded port carried its own brand name, garum sociorum, and fetched a thousand sesterces for barely two liters according to Pliny, more than three years of a legionary's pay. Martial name-dropped the sauce in his poetry as a status gift for Saturnalia. Excavators uncovered the salting vats at El Majuelo park in 1970, nineteen centuries after they last cured a fish.

What happened here

Rows of stone vats sunk into the ground beside the sea, and the smell reaches a long way inland. Small fish and the guts of larger ones are layered with salt and left in the sun for weeks; the liquid that separates off is drawn away as fish sauce and the residue is sold cheaply as paste. Grades run from a luxury sauce that costs more than good wine down to the version bought by everyone else. Tunny is netted in season from lookout towers on the headland, and the fishing, salting, potting and shipping all happen within a few hundred metres. Amphorae are stamped with the maker's name. Towns built on this are rich, and they are built downwind of themselves.

In ancient writing

• Strabo, Geography 3.4.2

  Strabo names Sexi among the Phoenician-founded coastal towns of southern Iberia noted for large fish-salting establishments.

Sources

• Pliny the Elder, Natural History 31.94
• Martial, Epigrams Book 13
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexi_(Phoenician_colony)