A spectacular section of Roman quarry appears in the heart of Montjuïc

BarcelonaMontjuïc Mountain isn't very high, measuring just 177 meters, but it has a long history and an umbilical cord with Barcelona. Most of the city's most emblematic buildings have been built with Montjuïc stone: the Roman wall, the Roman temple, the first Christian church, the Romanesque and Gothic cathedral, the Gothic palaces of the Ribera... The discovery of the remains of a quarry face from the Great Period, meters long and five meters high (seven, if you count the two hidden underground) can reveal many things about how it was exploited. It is the oldest documented Roman quarry in Barcelona and one of the oldest in Europe, and a section will be preserved: about eight meters that will form part of the parking lot for some apartments being built on Avinguda de los Ferrocarrils Catalans, between numbers 11 and 19. However, only residents and restoration technicians will be able to see it.

The Montjuïc quarry was already exploited during prehistory. The oldest recorded human site on the Barcelona plain has been found: a jasper extraction workshop from the Epipaleolithic period. It was excavated for many more centuries, until the 1960s. Between 1989 and 1990, an archaeological campaign already discovered that local sandstone had been mined in that area since Roman times. The new section would be the continuation of the quarry discovered in 1990 and provides many clues as to the fact that exploitation in this area was much more extensive than previously believed. Both Iluro (Mataró) and Bétulo (Badalona) were built with stones from Montjuïc. The quarry that has now been located predates the foundation, between 15 and 10 BC. Colonia Iulia Faventia Paterna Barcino (Barcelona) that generated a huge demand for stone.

The current Catalan capital began as a small 10-hectare settlement built on two hills, known in the Middle Ages as the Taber world. The city was surrounded by a wall from its founding, with an aqueduct that brought water from the area of present-day Montcada, near the Besòs River. There was a temple dedicated to the Emperor Augustus, a forum with several buildings, thermal complexes, and domestic buildings. The Romans were great builders and needed a lot of stone. "It's an extremely interesting discovery because it will give us a lot of information about Roman quarries, about which not much is known and which were extremely important from an urban planning point of view. The excavated material helps us understand the entire process, the extraction techniques, and the strategies used," highlights Anna Gutiérrez, head of the Classical Studies Unit (ICAC) and a specialist in Roman quarries. "We are at the zero moment of Barcelona," she adds.

Construction Tools and Strategies

Among many other things, it will be possible to determine whether the blocks extracted from this specific quarry correspond to those used to build the Roman wall of Barcelona. holes in the base where they placed metal wedges and, by percussion, broke the base," he adds. In Roman times, the Llobregat River did not have a delta but an estuary, and Montjuïc was a promontory surrounded by sea. In fact, the coastline reached approximately where the Zona Franca promenade is now. as a quarry, because they transported the stone blocks by boat," Gutiérrez points out.

The discovery is much richer in other data because the quarry was used as a dump. As they expanded the quarry, they dumped everything on the surface that was in their way, and thanks to these remains. Iberian pottery, Bell Beaker pottery from Naples, and a censer depicting the goddess Demeter," explains excavation leader Andrew Kelly.