Segóbriga, near Madrid, is a textbook Roman city. Now that it is being excavated seriously or scientifically, you can see the ruins of the old Roman buildings. It had one of each, and a good one. There is a theater, an amphitheater, a circus, a basilica, a temple, baths, a cistern and sewers, a cemetery—all the standard pieces of a Roman city. It might almost be a modern re-creation for educational purposes. But it is the real thing! There were gladiators in its amphitheater, old Latin plays in its theater, emperor worshippers in the temples, magistrates walking around in togas, and slaves.
And what is even better, so you don’t have to merely speculate about what happened, there are ancient references to her with information and stories enough for a good novel. Pliny the Elder talks about her—he was there! And what does he say?
Segóbriga was a mining town. The mines brought her great wealth and made some of the local families rich, and they built the monuments for their hometown.
Mines? What Mines? Is there coal or some mineral around there?
No coal, no metal. Plaster.
How can you get rich on plaster?
Plaster, or rather GYPSUM, in its crystal state (selenite) is transparent. Rocks of it split into fine sheets. What can you do with those?
Selenite blocks from the Roman mines
In ancient Rome buildings had windows (wind eyes—square or rectangular holes in walls to let in light and air) but no glass panes. To let in the light you had to let in the cold or the heat. Probably most of the time people kept those windows blocked with a curtain or a shutter.
The idea to use the sheets of crystal gypsum for window panes came to someone around the turn of the millenium. An architect imported some big ones from Spain and used them as skylights to light the public baths in Rome. Then the rich started doing the same for their houses and villas. In time, the gypsum was used as window-glass.
It was a fad. It coincided with the big economic boom of the first century. Buildings, private and public, were going up everywhere. “The best lapis specularis in the world,” says Pliny, “comes from an area of 100,000 paces around a little town in Spain called Segóbriga.”
If you are lucky enough to make friends with a young enthusiast from the nearby town of Osa, you may put on a miner’s helmet with its carbide lantern and crawl down into one of the long-since abandoned mines to see the endless galleries and the pick gouges made 2000 years ago by Latin-speaking slaves. That mine will soon be open to the public.
Inside one of the lapis specularis mines near Segóbriga, Spain, with ancient graffiti
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