Roman Valencia

In the quiet suburb of Lliria, just outside Valencia, Spain, I find myself standing beneath an apartment building, where a grand subterranean space was once meant to be a parking lot for the luxury apartments above. But a builder's shovel struck more than just rock; it hit a Roman tombstone. The city's swift intervention preserved the site, at the cost of the building losing its underground parking. 

This is a familiar tale in Spain, a country where Roman ruins are as common as their fiestas. Lliria's ground regularly gives up its ancient secrets: a nymphaeum's stone tablet found in a nearby pond, a cache of freshly minted Roman denarii unearthed under a house, the base of a Roman triumphal arch standing quietly on a sidewalk, and most spectacularly, a magnificent mosaic floor depicting the 12 Labors of Hercules, part of the ruins of a Roman villa buried beneath the modern town.