THE ROMANS

Ptolemy, the Greek astronomer born two centuries before Christ, said that very near here, between the right margin of the Guadalhorce river and the land where the Parador de golf is nowadays, the Phoenicians founded the town called Saduce, which was very influential in the Mediterranean as a fluvial port. There are hardly any remains of its existence.

The Greeks, of whose presence on our coasts we have no indication, were not great adventurers. However, we do have sign of the presence of the Romans, who, 2,000 years ago, built a several meter wide way that joined Gades (Cadiz) with Malaka (Málaga) and crossed Torremolinos from one end to the other. It almost reached the beach in the area of Playamar, it continued opposite Los Alamos and went up towards Churriana, near the walls of the Benitez camp.

On both sides of this way, they built villas and salting industries. From the eleven factories that there is evidence of, three were in our municipality. One was near what we nowadays know as Benitez camp in the rural estate Cizaña Baja, the remains of which are still preserved; another, of which there are not any remains, was in Los Alamos; and a third one, of which there are not any remains either, was close to the cliffs of La Roca, in the Bajondillo.

The chronicles say that in the year 1881, in the area of La Roca, a heavy storm discovered a thermal pool , a room with a colour mosaic and a kind of changing room of public baths, very important in the Roman Era, since they were mentioned 2,000 years ago by authors of the time such as Plinio the Old and Pomponio Mela.

There are also testimonies of some neighbours that assure that when the new town of Los Alamos was built, sarcophagus and Roman remains appeared, but there are no written records on the findings and, if it were true, nobody knows where they ended up.

Unfortunately, the same as happened with the prehistoric caves mentioned before, nobody stopped to think of the importance that a those remains would have one day for the history of our town, so they were covered and built on top, and thus, we lost a part of ourselves.

In the early 1990s, in an area near the Cantabria square, a small Roman necropolis was found. In a first chance excavation, three tombs inside which there were abundant human remains were found. These findings let us conclude that there was a settlement close to this area about 2,000 years ago.