Cividade de Terroso - Defensive System

Defensive System

The most typical characteristic of the castros is its defensive system. The inhabitants had chosen to start living in the hill as a way of protection against attacks and lootings by rival tribes. The Cividade was erected at 152 metres height (about 500 feet), allowing an excellent position to monitor the entire region. One of the sides, the north, was blocked by São Félix Hill, where a smaller castro was built, the Castro de Laundos, that served as a surveillance post.

The migrations of Turduli and Celtici proceeding from the South of the Iberian Peninsula heading North are referred by Strabo and were the reason for the improvement of the defensive systems of the castros around 500 BC.

Cividade de Terroso is one of the most heavily defensive castros, given that the acropolis was surrounded by three rings of walls. These walls were built at different stages, due to the growth of the town.

The walls had great blocks without mortar and were adapted to the hill's topography. The areas of easier access (South, East and West) possessed high, wide and resistant walls; while the ones in land with steep slopes were protected mainly by strengthening the local features.

That can easily be visible with the discovered structures in the East that present a strong defensive system that reaches 5.30 metres (17 feet 5 inches) wide. While in the Northeast, the wall was constructed using natural granite that only was crowned by a wall of rocks.

The entrance that interrupted the wall was paved with flagstone with about 1.70 metres (5 feet 7 inches) of width. The defensive perimeter seems to include a ditch of about 1 metre (3 feet 3 inches) of depth and width in base of the hill, as it was detected while a house was being built in the north of the hill.

Ruins of one of the city walls The first map of the town made during the archaeological works in 1906