From a distance Monte Bernorio, a flat-topped mountain carpeted with grass in northern Spain, has a tranquil and inviting look. Don’t be deceived, warn scholars. Recent research, including archaeological digs that have unearthed a trove of military artifacts, reveals the strategic role the peak played in two fierce battles waged nearly 2,000 years apart.
Some 85 years ago, amid the Spanish Civil War, Republican forces aligned with the government in Madrid fought Nationalist rebels led by Generalissimo Francisco Franco for control of the summit, which overlooks key travel corridors. The battle lines were uncomfortably close in 1936 and ’37. “If you raised a shovel above the edge of the trench,” one combatant recalled, “[snipers] riddled it with bullets.”
For shelter the 20th century defenders relied on Iron Age fortifications that two millennia prior had witnessed another battle. In 26 bc a Roman army commanded by Emperor Caesar Augustus—aka Octavian, the adopted son of his maternal great-uncle Julius Caesar—stormed a massive fortress erected atop the mountain by the tribal Cantabri people of the Iberian Peninsula (present-day Spain). The assault was critical to the emperor’s plan to conquer northern Iberia, a goal that had eluded Rome for two centuries. In 2018 a team led by archaeologists Jesús F. Torres-Martínez of the Complutense University of Madrid and Manuel Fernández-Götz of the University of Edinburgh deemed Monte Bernorio “one of the most impressive defensive works in the whole of Iron Age Europe.”
Over the past two decades research has revealed the epic scale and ferocity of these disparate battles atop Monte Bernorio. Archaeologists have documented an extensive network of Iron Age ramparts, ditches and limestone walls up to a dozen feet thick that enclosed a settlement of
