Basílica de Vega del Mar

Specialists have been arguing about this building for decades and still disagree on the basics: whether it was designed with one apse or two, and whether it went up in the fifth century, the sixth, or later. What nobody disputes is the font — a single block of marble cut as a cross for full-immersion baptism, which from a quarter turn reads as the early Christian fish.

Found under a eucalyptus plantation

The site came to light in 1915 on the Linda Vista Baja estate near the beach at San Pedro de Alcántara, when the area was being planted with eucalyptus, and the first authorised excavation followed under the San Pedro colony company. Substantial digging in 1930 exposed the basilica floor surrounded by a necropolis. The finds were judged important enough that the significant material went to the National Archaeological Museum in Madrid, where it remains. The site was declared a monument in 1931.

Why the dating is contested

The disagreement between specialists is unusually explicit. Palol dated the temple to the sixth century on architectural parallels and put the conversion of a side room into a baptistery in the second half of that century. Fontaine also argued for the second half of the sixth century but dated the west apse earlier. Schlunk and Hauschild proposed a single-apse basilica of the fifth to sixth centuries, with the southern atrium added in the sixth or seventh on ceramic evidence. Ulbert defended the twin-apse plan as original. A common reading is that a mid-fourth-century church stood here first, was destroyed by the Mediterranean earthquake of 365 AD, and was replaced by the structure whose plan survives. Coins running through to the reign of Liuva II indicate the necropolis stayed in use for a very long time.

The dead outnumber the walls

Only about a metre of wall height survives, so the basilica reads as a floor plan rather than a building: roughly square, three naves divided by irregularly placed pillars, walls sixty centimetres thick built from polished pebbles and lime mortar, sacristy rooms known as the prothesis and diaconicon at the north-west. The necropolis is the substance. Close to two hundred burials have been excavated, inside and around the temple, mostly brick-built and some marble-lined, making it one of the largest Roman-era burial grounds in Spain. Grave goods include rings, belt buckles and vessels showing Visigothic and Byzantine cultural elements, and a few tombstones name individuals — among them a girl called Firmana who lived and died on this coast.

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