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From Gallaecia to the Euro-Region
Mount Murado (Senhora da Saude, Vila Nova de Gaia)
Gallaecia was articulated for Romans
around the three capital cities of their
respective territories or conventus:
Braga (Bracara Augusta), Lugo (Lucus
Augusti) and, outside the Eixo territory,
Astorga (Asturica Augusta), whose
shared surname makes reference to the
foundation of the Augustan dynasty, a
while after the conquest. They were
complemented by others, smaller
but also important, such as Ourense
and Vigo, which were born as small
villages but ended up flourishing, or
Chaves (Aquae Flaviae), elevated
to the category of municipality in 79
by Titus Flavius Vespasianus, and
which was a fundamental city for the
articulation of the Galician southeast.
If all these Roman cities had a continuity
in time, reaching the present moment
with important villages, in some other
cases the opposite happened. In
the parish of Freixo, in Marco de
Canaveses, 20 kilometres east from
Penafiel, one can find the ruins of
Tongóbriga. The excavations carried
out since 1980 showed, besides a
residential area, different public spaces
in this city born at the beginning of the
2nd century. It can be observed the
forum, a series of commercial places
and thermal baths, in which those of
Roman tradition complemented the
former ones, still with a castro style,
with its pedra formosa.
Did you know?
When the Roman soldiers confronted the fog at the Limia river, the
believed that they were before the Letheo, the River of Oblivion in the
Greek mythology. The legend says that general Decimus Junius Brutus
crossed the river and, in order to prove that his memory was intact and
to encourage his soldiers to cross, he called them by their own names,
one by one. Before this episode he had to faced different castro villages,
among which were the ones that would end up giving its name to the
whole land: kallaikoi.
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