Work to restore the archaeological site around the Castillo de la Duquesa in Manilva, a project promoted by Manilva Town Hall and funded by the Diputación de Málaga, has now got under way. The project has been awarded for 367,187.69 euros, of which the provincial authority will contribute around 327,000 euros and the Town Hall will cover the remainder.
The project, drawn up by the Diputación’s Architecture and Urban Planning service, involves improving the archaeological remains of part of a Roman villa and of the industrial area of a fish-salting factory, declared a Site of Cultural Interest (BIC) in 2005.
The work will focus on the remains around the Castillo de la Duquesa in Manilva, specifically those on the municipally owned plot opposite the castle itself, following the provisions of the Special Plan for the BIC Archaeological Zone ‘Entorno Castillo de la Duquesa’, although the area affected by the project covers only a very small part of the area covered by that special plan.
The first work under way consists of cleaning and consolidating the archaeological structures, as well as removing harmful vegetation across the whole plot. The foundations for the walkway itself will also be laid. At this stage, archaeological monitoring and consolidation work before the walkway structure is installed is important.
Likewise, some sections will be finished off by reusing the structures once the clearing work has been carried out, and any wall stones that, although in their original position, are not firmly fixed will be bonded back in place.
In addition, special attention will be paid to areas with unstable walls or serious cases of lack of cohesion. A line of slate stone slabs will be placed between the rebuilt sections and the original structure to distinguish them.
Finally, a bed of gravel will be laid in the areas between walls where no paving remains. These gravel beds will be of different colours so as to show visitors, graphically, how to read the site correctly. To this end, grey, white and ochre gravel is planned, which will distinguish the residential area from the industrial areas and the later 19th-century elements.
Elevated walkway to tour the site
After these first consolidation works, an elevated route will be built to protect the remains, using a steel walkway with a timber deck, with a small access control point that will have general information panels about the site as a whole.
The route will allow the whole archaeological site to be viewed and explained in an orderly way, passing through each of its parts: the villa, the factory warehouses, the area of tanks, and the important remains of water channels and small wells found throughout the plot. In this way, people’s unrestricted movement at excavation level is also kept to a minimum in order to protect the archaeological remains.
