Archaeologists have identified a room within the Roman villa of Fuente Álamo, near Puente Genil in Córdoba, as the oldest confirmed library on the Iberian Peninsula. A team from the University of Granada overturned an earlier theory that the space had been a shrine to the god Mithras, arguing instead that its architecture matches known patterns of Roman library design. According to the study published in the Journal of the Mediterranean, titled “ New Approaches to Identifying Roman Libraries ”, the researchers place Fuente Álamo as the westernmost library documented anywhere in the Roman Empire, adding a significant new chapter to the story of literary culture in Roman Spain. Scholars believe the chamber once held wooden shelving and scrolls, now vanished, and note that identifying such spaces remains notoriously difficult given how little physical evidence survives from antiquity, making this find especially valuable for historians.
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