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Villa of El Ruedo
About
A working farm with a separate residential wing rose on a hillside above the Caicena valley around the middle of the 1st century CE, decades before Trajan, a native son of Baetica, took the throne. The house was rebuilt across four major phases between the 1st and 5th centuries. A marble sculpture of a sleeping Eros and a fish-pond mosaic pulled from its reception rooms rank among the finest domestic art found in rural Cordoba province. By 117 CE the villa had already stood for roughly six decades, with three more centuries still ahead of it.
What happened here
A working estate with a comfortable house attached, and the proportions vary with how rich the owner is and how often he visits. The farm side has presses for oil and wine, threshing floors, storage sunk into the ground, stables and quarters for the workforce. The residential side has baths, dining rooms sited for the view, mosaics, and a garden with water in it. A manager runs the place year-round and reports; the owner arrives for the vintage and for the summer. Produce goes to market or to the owner's town house, and the accounts are kept in detail. Some villas are pure retreat with no farm at all, built on a cliff or a lake specifically to be looked at from a boat.
Sources
- Desiderio Vaquerizo, 'La villa romana de El Ruedo (Almedinilla, Cordoba), paradigma de asentamiento rural en Baetica', Anales de Arqueologia Cordobesa
- D. Vaquerizo and J.M. Noguera Celdran, La villa romana de El Ruedo (Almedinilla, Cordoba): decoracion escultorica e interpretacion, Diputacion de Cordoba, 1997
Nearby
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Roman Maps shows the empire frozen at 11 August 117 CE, the day Trajan died — its moment of greatest territorial extent. Explore the full map →