Modern Málaga didn’t know that it had a Roman theatre until the day before yesterday, so to speak. It happens that they only found this construction in 1951, when they were doing works for the House of Culture of the city, and it appeared just in time to celebrate its two thousand birthday.
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Modern Málaga didn’t know that it had a Roman theatre until the day before yesterday, so to speak. It happens that they only found this construction in 1951, when they were doing works for the House of Culture of the city, and it appeared just in time to celebrate its two thousand birthday.
Because this theatre was built at the end of the first century BC, in times of the first emperor of Rome called Augustus, Octavian or Octavianus depending on the case. The Roman ruler was divinised and worshipped after his death, but during the last years of his mandate, while a boy from Galilee helped his carpenter dad, a new and peculiar religion was born that would end up undermining the foundations of the empire and making the Emperor a simple mortal more. Inside the citadel, you can find some of the columns that have been here since the days of Augustus.
The thing is that the theatre was used for around three centuries, and fell into disuse. But the worst wasn’t that. The worst were the Arabs who arrived in 712, and who had no problem in dismantling that ancient wonder and use its stones for the construction of their own necropolis.
However, a good part of the monument survived the Paleo-Christian and Muslim eras, and here you have it today as a testimony of what must have been the splendour of Málaga grown under the wing of Rome.
They used the slope of a hill to build the stands on it; something that, like so many other things, the Romans copied from the Greeks following their practical sense and their lack of prejudice. The rest of the building also responds to the usual pattern, with its proscenium, its orchestra reserved for VIPs, and its vomitorium, which against what you may be thinking with such a name, is only a passage below the seats for the entrance and exit to the venue.
Overall, an architectural jewel of which they decided in the nineties to give priority, demolishing the House of Culture that occupied part of the space and digging the surrounding area to restore and consolidate the building. And that’s because a Roman theatre should be shown off...
