Citânia de Briteiros

This embryo of a town, in the rough design of a Celtic castro, is more than two thousand years old. The settlement is protected by walls, inside the circular houses are laid out in small ‘blocks’, and there are also sheds for the cattle.

Citânia de Briteiros is one of the most interesting examples of the castro culture that developed in the Iberian Peninsula in the second century BC. The castros, as these settlements are called, were situated at great heights so their inhabitants could keep watch for potential invaders. Many of Portugal's present cities have their origins in these castros.

Martins Sarmento, leaving his old manor (Solar da Ponte, the actual Museum of the Pre-roman Culture), at the foot of the mount of S. Romão, headed early in the morning to the hillsides of the mounts hanging over him, finding in them many answers and interrogations for a thousand questions that his untiring enthusiasm would pursue until the limit of his strength.

Based on a proper method, but gradually scientifically thriving, he started, at the 10ht of July of 1874, the explorations that would put short important vestiges of our past. To the defensive advantages that the land offered, and that had not been forgotten in the choice of this local for the construction of the town, joins three waists of walls (which are four in the side north, but more vulnerable), whose average thickness is about two meters and the height five, fact that confers a certain aspect of inexpugnability. A net of irrigation ditches completes this system.

The constructions are dispersed along the hillsides. Two main streets cross between them, in which emerge other secondary ones, confiding small squares to the long passage, beyond a possible acropolis, at the top, where we presently can find the chapel of S. Romão. The population seems to have had a certain importance, not only for its dimensions but also for its extra-walls expansion. At the total, there are more than 150 vestiges of habitations, and still many for exhuming, predominating the circular plant but also some of the rectangular plant, contending many of them porches at the entrance. The sidewalk, inclined to hinder the water infiltration, encircles the houses, whose interiors were rarely coated by rock, having a pillar that functioned as support for the covering at the centre, its doors rise about four or five palms from the soil, access to the interior was probably made by mobile stairs, and we are not certain if they would have other openings.

Of the exposed vestiges, we still need to designate a public fountain, from which, by the edges of the streets, ran the conducting water gutters, and, above all, a monolith named by Pedra Formosa (Beautiful Stone).

Of a great importance for its cultural characterization, there are the many artistic motives, as well as inscriptions and varied objects of quotidian use (millstones, glasses, ceramics, metals, weapons, coins...). These decorative motives, present in stone as in metals or ceramics, show and prove an artistic unit at the level of the north-west region of the peninsula.

More information in:

http://citania.csarmento.uminho.pt/default.asp?language=2

Museu da Cultura Castreja

The manor of Ponte (Solar da Ponte), located in S. Salvador de Briteiros, is a seigniorial building with a few baroque traces, constructed between the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century. It served of support to the archaeological research of Martins Sarmento in the Briteiros and Sabroso sites. It was kept in the memory of the Portuguese Archaeology history for, in 1877, being the place where the participants of the 1st National Archaeological Congress were received. Integrated in a complex of agricultural constructions, with porch, corral, dry land, granary with threshing-floor and mill, long time has left of being centre of agrarian activity, having passed for an abandonment and degradation process, that finished when, by the time of  the centenarian of the death of Francisco Martins Sarmento (1999) the SMS promoted its exterior restoration, with the purpose to materialize an old dream there: the installation of a monographic museum called Museum of the Pre-roman Culture , narrowly related to the Briteiros and Sabroso sites and the figure of the archaeologist Francisco Martins Sarmento.

In parallel of the archaeological estate, the Museum of Pre-Roman Culture gives particular prominence to the figure of the archaeologist of Briteiros, Francisco Martins Sarmento, whose memory is present all along the exhibition through its texts and photographs and objects that had belonged to it. The Museum of Pre-Roman Culture is opened to the public since the end of 2003.

More information in:

http://www.csarmento.uminho.pt/nephl_33.asp