Roman treasures

March 2, 2012

YESTERDAY evening we drove to the Cornalvo reservoir, 14km outside the World Heritage city of Merida – the last five of them down a single-track road through a nature reserve where we encountered a disconcerting amount of oncoming traffic, including a large lorry.

Passing each vehicle involved inching perilously close to the roadside embankment, and the trip, in search of black-shouldered kite and Spanish imperial eagle, was as unsuccessful as it was unnerving.

Which made it all the more impressive, on visiting Merida today, to discover that the Romans who created it as the capital of their westernmost province, Lusitania, built the 18-metre high, 200-metre wide dam at Cornalvo, along with another at the Proserpina reservoir, and a complex system of aqueducts and conduits, to provide their water supply. What a feat of engineering.

We spent a happy morning wandering among the extensive remains of the Romans’ theatre with its huge marble columns, the adjacent amphitheatre where men fought wild animals and each other for their lives, and the nearby circus, where chariot races were staged, as well as strolling through the modern city centre streets to find the Forum and an old Moorish fortress.

The city also boasts the National Museum of Roman Art, a cathedral-like modern red-brick building, beautifully lit and laid out, housing some of the finest finds from the area, and from Spain as a whole. We watched experts at work cleaning and piecing together elaborate mosaic floors, to be displayed on the walls as you might hang a rug.

Not that it’s all high culture in Merida. The leaflet we were handed extolling the city’s attractions included an advert for a shop specialising in local produce whose chief claim to fame was that its proprietor, one Nico Jiminez, features in the Guinness Book of Records for being – as far as I could make out with my unreliable Spanish - the carver of the longest continuous slice of ham.