Archaeologists found a Roman camp 500 meters from a Spanish hillfort whose temples burned

A Roman military camp of 1.7 hectares has been identified roughly 500 meters from La Peña del Castro, an Iron Age hillfort in the province of León, northern Spain. The hillfort already held two stone temples that a fire destroyed in the second or first century BC, and the new find places a Roman base on high ground overlooking the burned settlement. The University of León team behind it says the camp is unusually well preserved.

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A stone-walled camp above the hillfort

The camp has a quadrangular plan and a curved entrance of the type known as a clavicula. Its perimeter wall is built of local stone about 1.5 meters wide, now standing under half a meter high but probably twice that when soldiers used it. Behind the wall, the builders raised an earthen platform about 12 meters wide that served as a walkway, braced the rampart and lifted the interior above the slope. Traces of perishable structures inside the enclosure turned up alongside weapon fragments and iron hobnails from military footwear, the kind of small debris that marks where Roman soldiers actually stood. The position overlooks both the hillfort and the approaches to it, giving the occupants a clear view of the settlement they were besieging.

As a type of Roman castra, it left a recognizable footprint, and the recovered hobnails from soldiers’ boots are the sort of detail that confirms who was here. Researchers first spotted the outline through aerial photography, LiDAR and other prospection methods, then confirmed it with a spring survey and summer excavation in 2026. Eduardo González Gómez de Agüero, who co-directs the project, said in the university’s release that a camp linked to a hillfort in this condition is rare.

Two D-shaped temples and the fire that ended them

The settlement the camp overlooks was no ordinary village. According to Arkeonews’ report on the discovery, two stone temples stood opposite each other on a main street near the entrance, both D-shaped with raised doorways. The first, about 6 meters across, was built of yellowish sandstone and had a rectangular altar scorched by repeated burning, with charred animal bones and cereals nearby. The second, excavated in 2014, measured about 8 meters in diameter, had three rooms and a stone-slab altar, and yielded a large sacrificial knife and purification vessels.

An elevated stone passage linked the two buildings, and the researchers suggest the ceremonies honored deities tied to agricultural cycles and the powers of the earth. A fire later destroyed both temples and damaged part of the settlement.

The Cantabrian Wars and the question of intent

The fighting that most plausibly explains the camp is the Cantabrian Wars, fought from 29 to 19 BC against the Cantabri and Astures and completing Rome’s conquest of northern Hispania, with Emperor Augustus directly involved. Rome won, and the regions came under its control, though minor revolts continued until 16 BC and two legions stayed on for decades afterward. A well-preserved base from that campaign, sitting right beside a burned native stronghold, is a rare physical record of how the conquest looked on the ground rather than in later written accounts. The attack on the hillfort appears to have come up the northern slope. A watchtower on the upper part of the site may show how Rome kept control after the assault, and the team is testing whether Roman forces tore down more buildings once the settlement fell, a chronology that remains uncertain.

Here the interpretation turns bolder. In the University of León’s announcement of the camp, González Gómez de Agüero says “It’s not only about defeating the enemy, but humiliating it, erasing its identity and breaking its ties to the land.” The archaeologists stop well short of claiming proof, however. They have not demonstrated that Roman soldiers specifically targeted the temples to suppress local religion, and the order of events between the camp, the assault and the burning is still being worked out.

Group director Carlos Fernández called the camp an important step toward understanding how the conquest unfolded on the Cantabrian slope of León.

A decade of digging and what comes next

Excavations at La Peña del Castro began in 2013 and paused during the pandemic. The current work is part of the cross-border POCTEP 2021-2027 program, an INTERREG Spain-Portugal initiative funded through Castilla y León, with support from the town council of La Ercina. Local mayor Ignacio Robles pointed to the close relationship between archaeologists and residents, summing it up with the remark that what is unknown is not loved.

The open question is sequence. If the camp came first, it was a siege base; if the temples burned earlier, it may have been something closer to an occupation post. The team’s next seasons are aimed at that chronology, and at whether the temples were a deliberate target or simply caught in the burning of a settlement that Rome took by assault from the north. For now, the camp gives archaeologists a fixed Roman reference point beside the hillfort, which makes the Iron Age fire easier to read against the written history of the Cantabrian campaign.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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