City Walls of Conimbriga

WallLusitania · Condeixa-a-Velha, PortugalBuilt 285 CE

Not standing in 117 CE

About

A second known dating trap for Conimbriga: for the whole of its 1st- and 2nd-century golden age, including 117 CE, the town had no defensive circuit at all — an open, confident settlement. Multiple independent sources agree the roughly 1,500-meter stone wall visitors see today, which cuts straight through the House of the Fountains and other houses (its stone quarried from their demolition), only went up hastily around the end of the 3rd century as frontier anxieties grew, abandoning the outer residential quarters. No earlier wall phase is attested.

What happened here

A town wall is a claim as much as a defence. It is faced in stone, cored with rubble and concrete, and pierced by gates that are more decorated than the rest of it put together. Towers project so that anyone at the base can be shot from the side. In most of the empire in this century the walls are old, unmanned, and half built over — shops lean against them and houses are cut into them — because the frontier is a long way off and the danger is not here. On the frontier itself a wall is something else entirely: a continuous barrier with ditches, gates at intervals, patrol tracks and manned turrets, built to control movement rather than to stop an army.