Dilip Kuner
BEFORE there were the Romans there was another ancient civilisation that was putting down roots in Spain.
The University of Malaga has launched a fresh dig to uncover the city’s ancient Phoenician past.
Led by Professor Jose Suarez, a team of more than 50 archaeologists, students and international experts are back at Cerro del Villar, a site described as one of the best-preserved Phoenician settlements in the western Mediterranean.
The month-long excavation, funded by the Junta de Andalucia, runs until September 26 and is already turning up tantalising clues about how Malaga was born nearly 3,000 years ago.
Previous digs confirmed that the now-inland site – once an island at the mouth of the Guadalhorce River – was a thriving hub where settlers from the Middle East rubbed shoulders with local tribes.
“It was the great settlement of the bay of Malaga, the cradle of our city,” Suarez explained.
This year’s focus is a huge 7th-century BC building, stretching more than 20 metres along what would have been the shoreline. Experts believe it may have been a public building, a clue that the settlement boasted complex urban planning rather than just a scattering of huts.
Researchers are carefully mapping its internal layout and construction phases in a bid to understand how the Phoenicians organised their daily lives.
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Another trench has revealed what looks like a Punic pottery workshop from the 5th century BC, with the remains of a kiln and heaps of broken amphorae.
The discovery suggests the site was a key industrial hub for the city of Malaka – later Malaga – producing the jars used to ship fish preserves and wine across the ancient Mediterranean.
Studies already show Malaga’s fishy exports made it as far as Corinth in Greece, proving the city was plugged into the international trade networks of the time.
The team is also hunting for answers about a Roman fish-salting factory detected in 2022 using underground scans. The plant, abandoned in the 5th century AD, operated at the same time as the salting pools above Malaga’s Roman Theatre – meaning the city was still thriving as a seafood powerhouse centuries after the Phoenicians had gone.
Alongside the academics, a large group of history undergraduates and recent graduates from Malaga University are getting their hands dirty in the trenches and the labs, processing finds under the guidance of conservation experts.
And with international archaeologists from Chicago and Marburg joining forces with local experts and Spain’s top research council, the dig has all the hallmarks of a blockbuster summer for Malaga’s forgotten past.
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