Egitânia: the Roman and Visigothic city of Idanha-a-Velha

Beneath the houses, gardens and granite streets of Idanha-a-Velha, in the Beira Baixa, lies one of the densest archaeological palimpsests in Portugal. Within the same enclosure, on the right bank of the river Pônsul, the Roman city of Civitas Igaeditanorum, the Suevic-Visigothic Egitânia and the medieval and modern settlement overlap in a continuum of occupation spanning more than two thousand years. This page addresses the ancient city and its remains; the village of today and the visit are covered on the Idanha-a-Velha page.

From the Civitas Igaeditanorum to Egitânia

The Roman foundation dates to the late first century BC, in the time of Augustus and within the context of the reorganisation of the province of Lusitania. The city was the capital of the Igaeditani people. The oldest evidence of the urban settlement is an inscription of around 16 BC recording the gift of a sundial to the Igaeditani by a citizen of Emerita Augusta (Mérida). The city occupied a strategic position in the network of Roman roads linking Mérida with the interior and north of Lusitania, which favoured its growth: it received walls, public buildings, a temple and a bridge over the Pônsul.

With the disintegration of the Roman world, the settlement retained its importance. In the Suevic-Visigothic period it became the seat of a diocese, the Egitania — a bishop of the city took part in the Council of Lugo in 569 — which gave it administrative and religious weight among the greatest in the interior Beira. In 713 the city was taken by Muslim armies and the bishopric was extinguished; the diocese was only restored in 1199, by then transferred to Guarda, whose bishop still preserves in his title the memory of the ancient Egitânia.

The strength of Egitânia lies not in an isolated monument but in the density of its stratigraphy: the medieval tower rises over the podium of a Roman temple, and the old cathedral rests on early Christian structures — each era reused and rewrote the one before.

Walls, cathedral and baptistery

The fortified perimeter, some 750 metres long with semicylindrical towers, combines Roman foundations with medieval reworking and is one of the most legible elements of the ensemble. Within it survives the old cathedral (or basilica), a three-aisled building of early Christian origin, profoundly remodelled in the Visigothic period, with shafts reused from Roman buildings. It counts among the most important witnesses of Visigothic art in Portugal and has its own page at the Sé de Idanha-a-Velha. Beside it stands a baptistery with a baptismal font, a trace of the city’s Christianisation between the Suevic and Visigothic periods.

The square tower that dominates the enclosure — known as the Templars’ Tower or keep — rests on the remains of a Roman temple, an eloquent illustration of the reuse of structures that characterises the whole site. Outside the walls lie also the Roman bridge over the Pônsul, with five arches, and stretches of roads and gates of the ancient city.

The largest epigraphic collection in the territory

Egitânia is distinguished above all by its corpus of inscriptions. The site holds one of the largest assemblages of Roman epigraphy in the Iberian Peninsula — votive altars, funerary stelae, milestones and dedicatory inscriptions. For decades the collection was displayed inside the old cathedral; today a selection is shown in the Epigraphic Archive, housed in the village’s former wine-press. These pieces document the religious, social and administrative life of the Civitas Igaeditanorum and make the site a privileged laboratory for the study of the provincial Roman world.

Systematic excavations began in 1955, under the direction of Fernando de Almeida, and continued through campaigns that revealed the basilica, the baptistery and thermal structures. The ensemble has been classified as a National Monument since 1997 and dialogues with other centres of archaeology of Roman Portugal: a provincial city whose memory survived, stone by stone, within a village.