Conimbriga

My cousin Ali visited me last weekend which was grand as ever. Since she's interested in ancient ruins we took the opportunity to visit Portugal's largest Roman settlement at Conimbriga.
Conimbriga is huge but not much remains above knee height except for part of the city wall and an arch near the old shower block. For me it became a little confusing trying to imagine the buildings from the ruins especially when I think back to Mirobriga - a smaller site but with more walls and columns remain to help you visualise the buildings. Perhaps for that reason concrete paving and columns have been used to partially reconstruct the forum at Conimbriga (I'm not sure whether this is a full re-building project or not). However I can't decide on the merits of this when I see remains of the real columns piled up in a heap.What Conimbriga does have is some of the best preserved mosaics I've seen anywhere, even better than Aquila in Italy. This is from the House of Fountains where for the bargain price of 50c you can start the watershow. I only hope it was impressive for the Roman times since they were a trickle compared to more modern fountains, or my backyard sprinkler.

Next door to the ruins is a museums containing the artefacts that have been recovered from the site. While it's not the greatest and most extensive collection it does make a big difference having the connection between the ruins and the artefacts, which you often don't get in the larger city museums where. Unless you're in the Pergammon Museum and the ruins have been reuilt inside the museum for you!Another thing the Romans left in Portugal was a series of mines up and down the country. Spain and Portugal was very important to the Empire because of the metals they could extract and use. Most of the mining done in Portugal in modern times has centered on these old workings and you can't help but be impressed by how they found these deposits and how well they exploited them. In this case in one of our projects they also processed the ore in a furnance, leaving the slags behind in dumps. 2000 years later the grass is still coloured an interesting shade of red.