About Toscanos
Discovered in 1961, Toscanos is the largest, best documented and most architecturally sophisticated Phoenician site on Spain’s southern coast. The prosperous urban settlement was founded in the mid-eighth century BC and abandoned in about 550 BC, when the population moved to nearby Cerro del Mar.
This was a period of intense trade with the local population, and Toscanos shares many features of other Phoenician sites in the region, including its location on a promontory dominating the mouth of the Vélez River, linking the Mediterranean to the interior of Andalucia and its indigenous communities.
Toscanos is in close proximity to other Phoenician sites, particularly Morro de Mezquitilla only seven kilomotres away, suggesting a degree of cooperation and reliance on each other. They also shared natural harbors in the same wide bay and necropolises separated from the urban area by rivers.
Excavation work at Toscanos by the German Archaeological Institute began in 1964 and continued until the 1980s, gradually revealing more of the site’s urban design. The first settlers built a small number of large rectangular buildings connected by streets and paths, with a defensive ditch also added during this early stage. The most impressive construction was an elite residence of 110 m² with seven rooms built around a central courtyard, evidence of the high social status of the first Phoenicians to arrive in Toscanos.
Within 30 years of its foundation, Toscanos was dramatically expanded, reorganised and upgraded, apparently in response to its growing economic success, with the residential and commercial districts in the centre of settlement clearly separated.
Around 700 BC, a monumental 165 m² warehouse was built in the middle of Toscanos consisting of three wings, at least two floors and a storage capacity far exceeding the needs of the settlement’s inhabitants. The remains of numerous transport and storage containers for merchandise including preserved meats and fish, grain, oil and wine have been discovered, suggesting the key role the warehouse played in regional trade.
The commercial importance of Toscanos is clear from the size and central location of the warehouse, which became the main focus of the settlement during the seventh century, with small and simple dwellings constructed around it, probably to accommodate personnel or used as office space.
At roughly the same time as the warehouse’s construction, a harbour complex was built with facilities for docking and handling cargo. From around 650 BC, the Toscanos settlement was extended to include the neighbouring hills of Cerro del Alarcón and Cerro del Peñón.
A large and isolated rectangular building with walls more than a metre thick was erected on the top of Cerro del Alarcón, most likely as a military outpost and part of the settlement’s outer fortifications. Shortly afterwards, a defensive wall was constructed that completely enclosed and protected the whole of Toscanos, either in response to a mysterious external threat or as simple security for the warehouse and the now considerably expanded site.
The Cerro del Peñón hill appears to have been used exclusively as an industrial quarter and metalworking district. A smelting furnace, considerable amounts of slag, bellows and pipes have been unearthed there, revealing the existence of workshops engaged in iron and copper processing. Apart from metalwork, local trade included purple dye and cloth production, fish and shellfish farming, and cattle rearing for meat, milk, ploughing and exchange.
Interestingly, Cerro del Peñón may have been used as a cemetery by the first settlers, with the discovery of a bronze incense burner (thymiaterion) and fragment of an alabaster urn indicating that burials took place somewhere on the hill.
Directly across the Vélez River from Toscanos lies the hill of Cerro del Mar, where typically Phoenician grave goods including mushroom-lip and trefoil (three-spouted) mouth jugs have been found, along with shaft tombs and alabaster urns containing cremated remains and perfume residue at Casa de la Viña, making it clear that this was the settlement's main necropolis. When Toscanos was abandoned in roughly 550 BC the population did not disappear, but simply moved across the river to a new location in Cerro del Mar.
Murex snail shells from the 10th-7th centuries BC with remains of Tyrian purple dye on the pottery shards.
The Purple People
The famous purple dye extracted from murex sea snail glands was the source of both the word ‘Phoenician’ (from the Greek for ‘purple people’) and the immense wealth generated by trade in this expensive dye, which often cost up to 20 times its equivalent weight in gold.
After the god Melqart’s accidental discovery of ‘Tyrian purple’ dye while trying to win the heart of a beautiful sea nymph, purple fabrics became a luxury associated in various cultures with royalty, nobility and the priesthood. This was because it took 12,000 sea snails to produce just 1.5 g / 0.05 oz of this intense dye, which deepened rather than faded over time, and was enough to colour only the fringe of a regular garment, making purple clothing a symbol of social status, wealth and power.
Given the labour-intensive manufacturing process, demand for Tyrian purple fabrics soon outstripped supply, and with the local murex snail population decimated, the Phoenicians looked further afield, with crushed murex shells found extensively at the Iberian sites of Toscanos, Morro de Mezquitilla and Almuñécar (Sexi).
Address
Opening Hours
Tues-Sat: 9am–9pm
Sun & holidays: 9am–3pm
Mon: Closed
Free admission for EU citizens and Spanish residents. Other visitors: €1.50.
The Museum of Malaga is located in the Palacio de la Aduana (Customs Palace) next to the hill of the Alcazaba in the centre of the city. The imposing neoclassical building was built in 1791 and became Malaga’s main museum in 1973, before undergoing refurbishment from 2008 until its reopening in 2016.
The museum brings together the collections of the former Provincial Museum of Fine Arts and the Provincial Archaeological Museum, and is divided into two sections, with more than 2,000 fine arts pieces and 15,000 in the archaeology collection making it the largest museum in Andalucia and the fifth largest in Spain.
One room is dedicated to the discoveries made since 1964 at the Phoenician sites of Toscanos, Trayamar, Morro de Mezquitilla, Jardín and Chorreras by the German Archaeological Institute. Highlights include the Trayamar Medallion (pictured), a shaft tomb from Chorreras, artefacts from Cerro del Villar, and the mysterious ‘Tomb of the Warrior’.
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