Valeria and its territory

A city between two gorges

Valeria was founded between 93 and 82 BC on a tongue of high land between two gorges, one of them the Gritos, and never lost the name of its founder, a Valerius Flaccus. Pliny mentions it in passing. Its great period came between the end of Augustus’ reign and the early Flavians, in the 1st century AD: the city’s aristocracy then paid for the forum with its porticoes, a judicial basilica, the tabernae (shops) and a nymphaeum, a monumental fountain, with a retaining wall 105 metres long. On the cliff edge, houses hung over the gorge.

Its citizens were enrolled in the Galeria tribe, and that makes them recognisable in inscriptions in the countryside.

The soldier of La Veguilla

About 30 km west of Valeria, at La Veguilla, on the left bank of the Guadazaón in the municipality of Arguisuelas, two inscriptions were known: an altar to Jupiter Optimus Maximus, found among the stones of a dry-stone wall, and a large funerary ashlar. Luis Mediamarca saw and measured it in 1867: two pieces of 75 by 95 cm, with letters 9 cm high. A man of the Galeria tribe whose name began Vitul- commissioned it for himself, his mother and his wife, who had a Greek name, Chelido.

In 2020 Jonathan Edmondson and Helena Gimeno published a third stone, reused in the pen of a village house and found, according to villagers, around 1900. It is a block from a mausoleum epitaph. It says the dead man had served in a century and won decorations, including at least two torcs, rigid metal neck rings, and was buried by his frater, brother or comrade-in-arms. The letter forms date it to the early decades of the 1st century. The editors believe the soldier returned to his homeland after discharge and lived in a villa in Valeria’s territory.

Statues in the forum

In the forum’s western portico was a large exedra that its excavators compare with the Forum of Augustus in Rome: a hall of fame with statues of the imperial family, gods and citizens the city wished to honour. Pedestals, inscriptions and bronze fragments survive, found in the cryptoporticus fills. One was dedicated to Diva Drusilla, Caligula’s sister, around AD 38 to 40; a torch fragment may have belonged to a statue of Ceres. Each campaign brings to light the names of another seven or eight people from Valeria.

Villas in the countryside

The wealth of that world can be seen at Noheda, in Villar de Domingo García, occupied between the 1st century BC and the 6th century AD, with 231 m² of figurative mosaic in a room of 290 m². In the hills, the Cueva del Hierro mine began to be worked in Roman times and continued producing iron until the 20th century.

A city dismantled

From the mid-3rd century Valeria’s buildings were gradually dismantled and stripped. In the 4th century, houses occupied the forum basilica. Water was lacking, and the city was far from the major roads. Some people moved about 500 metres down to the site of today’s village, where the church of La Sey reuses 2nd-century Roman shafts and capitals. By around the 5th century the old site was empty.

The territory filled with villages. In Fuentes, 12 km from Valeria, the cemetery of La Dehesa de la Casa-Los Balconcillos is mainly 7th-century; in Chumillas, about 15 km away, excavations have revealed Ciriyuelos, a village of about 6.5 hectares that lived from sheep and goats and lasted until the 8th century. Near the saltworks of Monteagudo, almost sixty people were buried at Los Colmenares.

The bishop without a city

Yet Valeria continued to exist on paper. In 610 its see signed the Constitutio Carthaginiensium Sacerdotum, and its bishop appeared at the Councils of Toledo until 693, when he signed the Sixteenth. Pilar Diarte-Blasco and Manuel Castro-Priego call these bishoprics sedes sine urbe, sees without a city: the Visigothic kingdom used the old Roman districts to organise the Church even when the city that gave them their name had been abandoned for centuries.

More about this era: Rome and lapis specularis.