Mérida - All Things Roman

We are now on our 5th and last night in Mérida, perhaps a day longer than necessary but we have used the time to see all the impressive Roman ruins here without exhausting ourselves.

The city was created as an idealized model of Rome. At the amphitheatre site, we bought general tickets - 17 € each - which is very good value as it gives you access to 8 different sites with no time or date restrictions. It included the Roman Amphitheatre, adjacent Roman Theatre, and the nearby Casa del Mitreo, or large Roman Villa so we spent a morning visiting those three sites. We were there close to opening time on a weekday and were able to wander around with few other people about. As we left the Amphitheatre and Theatre, tour groups were starting to arrive which we really dislike being around. Our strategy for seeing the popular sites is go early or go late. And at the Casa del Mitreo, there were few people as well.

In addition to the amazing Roman bridge, these are all really impressive Roman ruins and we were very happy to find that all the explanatory signage throughout these sites was also in English. No need to pay extra for an audio or guided tour in my opinion. One’s brain can only absorb so much information.

Briefly, the Amphitheatre was completed in 8 BC and was used for the gladiatorial combats between men and between men and animals. It was built as part of an “entertainment complex” along with the neighbouring Roman theatre. The amphitheatre is very large - 64.5m long by 41.2m wide, with a large pit in the middle and with grandstands that could accommodate 15,000 spectators and has stairs, hallways and gates providing access to different sections, which of course would depend on your status, as well as boxes for the super-elite, with their names carved into the stone front of the box and still visible. The upper stands were for slaves and the poor. Now the poor can’t even afford the nosebleed sections of our big spectacles. You could walk all along a high walkway looking down into the amphitheatre and go through various entrances right onto the “field”. The first photo is a drone shot I borrowed.

There were figures along one entrance of the truly fearsome looking gladiators of different types. Their lifespan was on average thought to be 27 years. In the 2nd C women and dwarves joined the gladiatorial spectacle. There were some video enactments of gladiator combats in the excellent Mérida Roman tourism building. We might be inclined to consider all this “barbaric” but I don’t think some of our “sporting” events - boxing, wrestling, bullfighting in Spain, American politics are far removed from the Romans’ taste for “blood” sports.

The adjacent Romano Teatro site was also amazing. It was constructed between 16 and 15 BC and could accommodate 6,000 spectators. The excavation of this ruin began in 1910. This is a model of what the entire theatre complex is thought to have been. It is still used for performances.

The orchestra and choir were located on the semicircular marble space in front of the stage. Most surfaced were faced with marble, some of which remains.

Behind the theatre was a large porticoed garden enclosed by walls with niches for statues of members of the Imperial family. I suspect if Trump were to ever see this, it would give him even more bizarre ideas about the Kennedy Centre for the Arts.

From there, it was a very short walk to the adjacent Casa del Mitreo, the excavated large Roman villa. Its construction dates from the end of the 1st C and it was abandoned at the end of the 4th C. Mostly under an open-air roof to protect the intact mosaic floors and frescos, you walk on an elevated walkway, through the various areas of the villa, where the living spaces and their functions are clearly delineated. You could see the remains of a water channel coming into a large cistern for the villa and through the villa were rills for water. We saw a similar excavated Roman villa site last year in Rincon de La Victoria, just slightly up the coast from Malaga. It was at least as impressive with many intact mosaic floors.

The modern city of Mérida is built upon Emerita, the old city, and there are ruins and remnants of walls and roads and columns everywhere, next to hotels or squares where modern living goes on. You probably can’t dig anywhere here without finding important archeological remains.

What is a bit unfortunate are some of the really ugly “modern” buildings that overlook many of these archeological sites. Our city planners and elected officials should give much more thought to the future, not just present needs as these unfortunate buildings that have little redeeming architectural value and often do not wear well, are with us for a very long time. Think James Bay’s towers, and they want to build more.

After a coffee in the warm sun, we figured we could manage two more Roman sites, both close together.The first, also included in our ticket was the Roman Circo or Circus Maximinus where the chariot races were held. Think Calgary Stampede chuckwagon races. Also modelled after the one is Rome, the Circo is an enormous expanse of more than 400 m in length and 30 m in width, and it could house up to 30,000 spectators. Mostly we were there on our own.

It seems to have been built sometime around 20 BC and inaugurated some 30 years later. At the time, it was located far outside the city walls, but close to the road that connected Emerita to Toledo and Córdoba. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the rise of Christianity in Spain, the Circo saw more use than the other Roman structures of the city, since racing was considered less sinful than other spectacles performed in the Theatre and the Amphitheatre.

Though a ruin, it is one of the best preserved examples of a Roman circus. Most other circuses’ structures have been destroyed over time as the areas occupied by them are desirable for other uses being very large spaces and often on flat land near their respective cities. The Mérida Circo however has kept numerous structures, including the Porta Pompae ("main entrance"), the Porta Triumphalis, the spina (the longitudinal wall), and the the tribunal iudicium ("tribune of the judges"). There are the remains of a dozen gated enclosures at one end from which the chariots would be released and a central structure around which they would race.

Apparently, the chariots were nothing like the heavy ornate ones you might recall from the movie, Ben Hur, but were very light and simple, pulled by two or more horses. And though death was not intended in the same way as the gladiator sports, it was horribly dangerous for man and horse, again not so different from modern horse racing where many horses die or are injured.

Then onto the last site of the day, in a park right near the Circo - the remains of a huge aqueduct. No tickets were required for this, and there was also another excavated Roman villa site in the park. The San Lázaro brought water to another section of Mérida. Only 3 pillars remain of the original Roman construction and storks have squatted picturesquely on the remaining towers. The rest of the aqueduct here was built in the Renaissance style in the 16th C - new! - and is preserved in its entirety. There is a second older colossal Roman aqueduct in another part of the city, known as “Los Milagros” - the Miraculous One - that was build close to the city’s founding, that we also visited. More on that later.

Time to head back to the apartamento. And we had takeout for dinner that we could eat at a reasonable time! Close to the Circo, was a great little shop with whole roasted chicken on the spit and lots of sides, including warm bread. We loaded up and went home, well and duly tired from our Dia Maximinus.