---
title: "A Roman camp 500 metres from La Peña del Castro, where two temples once burned"
description: "León archaeologists find the fortified base used against an Iron Age hillfort and ask if Rome set out to wipe out the people who lived there"
author: "Jan Sokol"
published: 2026-10-15T23:52:17Z
modified: 2026-10-16T04:25:28Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/a-roman-camp-500-metres-from-la-pena-del-castro-where-two-te-a56a58
language: en
tags: ["archaeology", "rome", "history", "war", "spain", "europe"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# A Roman camp 500 metres from La Peña del Castro, where two temples once burned

*León archaeologists find the fortified base used against an Iron Age hillfort and ask if Rome set out to wipe out the people who lived there*

By Jan Sokol · October 15, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/a-roman-camp-500-metres-from-la-pena-del-castro-where-two-te-a56a58

## In brief

- University of León archaeologists found a 1.7-hectare Roman camp about 500 metres from La Peña del Castro hillfort in León
- The camp is linked to the Cantabrian Wars of 29–19 BC, Rome’s final campaign to conquer northern Hispania
- Two Iron Age temples at the hillfort, from the 2nd and 1st centuries BC, were destroyed in a fire found in earlier digs
- Finds include weapon fragments and hobnails from soldiers’ shoes, and the assault came from the northern slope
- The team is investigating whether buildings were deliberately destroyed after the conquest, and the dating is still uncertain

The hill is called La Peña del Castro. It stands in the municipality of La Ercina, in the eastern mountains of the Spanish province of León, and for about two thousand years it has kept quiet about what happened there. Archaeologists from the University of León have been digging it since 2013, stopping only for Covid. Each season the hill has given up a little more, and almost all of it points to fire.

This year it gave up the camp of the men who brought that fire.

As [Leman Altuntaş reported for *Arkeonews*](https://arkeonews.net/did-rome-seek-more-than-victory-new-roman-military-camp-found-near-burned-temples/), the university’s team, whose excavations are co-directed by Eduardo González Gómez de Agüero, found a Roman military enclosure of 1.7 hectares about 500 metres from the hillfort. Spring surveys revealed it and summer excavations confirmed it. The team links it to the Cantabrian Wars of 29 to 19 BC, the last stage of Rome’s nearly two-hundred-year conquest of the Iberian Peninsula. Augustus himself took part in that war against the Cantabri and the Astures, and when it ended the north belonged to Rome.

## Two houses for the gods

Before the legions came, the settlement had something its excavators consider exceptional for northern Iberia. Two temples from the second and first centuries BC faced each other across a main street near one of the entrances. Both were D-shaped, built of stone, with raised doorways. A raised stone walkway joined them.

![Two roofless stone enclosures, highlighted yellow and red, stand among ancient ruins overlooking rugged mountains and a winding body of water.](https://rews.cc/img/4ce2d00d6ecd5f9766195d1709401862495cb01f.webp)

The smaller one, about six metres across, was built of yellowish sandstone. A large rectangular altar inside it was scorched again and again by ritual burning, and among the ashes lay charred bones of domestic animals and burnt cereals: offerings from the herd and from the field. The larger temple, about eight metres in diameter and dug out in 2014, was built of reddish stone and divided into three rooms, one with an altar of stone slabs. A large sacrificial knife was found there, with vessels linked to purification rites, and a pit by the entrance may have held offerings. The researchers think the gods worshipped here were gods of the harvest and of the earth’s powers.

Earlier campaigns established that an intense fire destroyed both temples and part of the town. The people who had brought grain and animals to those altars, perhaps for generations, became the evidence in an investigation into their own ruin.

## The camp above the slope

The camp was square, with a clavicula, the curved entrance typical of Roman camps from the conquest of the Cantabrian north. A wall of local stone about 1.5 metres thick ran around it. Today it stands less than half a metre high, and the researchers estimate it was once about twice that. Behind the wall the soldiers raised an earthen platform roughly 12 metres wide, which lifted the interior above the slope and gave room to move along the defences. That is a lot of building for what seems to have been a temporary post. According to [La Nueva Crónica](https://www.lanuevacronica.com/cabecera-portada/lnc-culturas/historia-campamento-ercina-arrasado-sangre-fuego-durante-conquista-romana_204671_102.html), the team found it with aerial photography and Lidar, and Carlos Fernández, who directs the university’s History and Archaeology research group, said the site was very well placed to watch both the settlement and every path into it.

![An engraved landscape shows a stone-walled camp with tents atop a rocky mountain ridge overlooking forested valleys, winding roads, and a distant hilltop fortress.](https://rews.cc/img/6e7b624dad60edccb6bdb892fbbd9bde6393393f.webp)

Little was left behind. There were fragments of weapons, and there were hobnails, the iron studs that gave grip and long life to the soles of Roman military shoes. The shoes have not survived. The nails have. González Gómez de Agüero said it is rare to find a camp tied to an Iron Age hillfort in such good condition. As [El Español noted](https://www.elespanol.com/castilla-y-leon/region/leon/20261015/descubren-campamento-militar-romano-junto-pena-castro-leon-vinculado-asedio-guerras-cantabras/1003744421670_0.html), the area had until now offered little direct evidence linking Roman camps to the hillforts they besieged. Fernández described León as a gap in three decades of Cantabrian Wars research that had already covered Asturias, Cantabria and Palencia.

## Fire, and after the fire

This season confirmed what earlier digs had suggested: the assault came up the northern slope. On the upper part of the hill the team has identified a watchtower, which may show how the Romans held the place once they had taken it.

The harder question is when the buildings fell. If they burned during the storming of the town, that is one story, the ordinary arithmetic of a siege. If they were pulled down after the defenders had already lost, that is another. The archaeologists are now asking whether the Romans took and occupied the settlement first and destroyed more of it later. The chronology is still open.

González Gómez de Agüero has put the hypothesis plainly. In the University of León’s announcement he said:

> It is not simply a matter of defeating the enemy, but of humiliating them, erasing their identity and breaking their ties to the territory.

![A vintage woodcut shows scattered grain and wheat stalks beside broken stone blocks, with a red fissure and a large perforated rectangular shadow.](https://rews.cc/img/8898da3d8e818c4c7152f8ac70434df1fd4e6d90.webp)

When the results were presented at the university’s Prehistory Laboratory, he said the work should help “stop romanticising the conquest of the northern peninsula too,” and he summed that conquest up in four words: “What it brings is destruction, fire, weapons, war.” His team has not yet shown that the soldiers singled out the temples to stamp out local worship. That remains to be tested.

One reflection is allowed here. Empires have always understood that a people can survive losing a battle more easily than losing its altars. A wall can be rebuilt, but the habit of carrying grain up a particular street to a particular stone is harder to restore once the stone is broken and the street belongs to someone else. Whether Rome did this at La Ercina on purpose is a question for the next trench. Elsewhere in its western conquests, a wall under a Paris hospital is [still being questioned about who burned Lutetia](https://rews.cc/a/someone-burned-lutetia-in-52-bc-and-a-wall-under-a-paris-hos-a63b27).

## The missing coin

For now the destruction can only be placed somewhere between 29 and 19 BC. A closer date would need a coin, and none has been found. The team says it still has to process everything it gathered and is already planning next year’s season. Funding comes from the regional government through Interreg funds, with help from the La Ercina town council and from volunteers and local residents. The [Heraldo de León](https://www.heraldodeleon.es/comarcas/provincia-leon/ercina-desvela-campamento-romano-que-cerco-poblado-astur/20261015141340113277.html) described the settlement the camp surrounded as an Astur one. Ignacio Robles, the mayor of La Ercina, recalled how uncertain the first digs in 2013 had been and called the camp a “great surprise” for local people. “Let us hope that future mayors continue their support,” he said.

The hobnails will go into drawers with labels on them. The names of the people who prayed at the two altars were never written down.