I have spent months studying and traveling to the ruins of the fortified hilltop villages of the vanished Celtiberians. One of the most interesting features of their culture and of life in their stone villages was their practice of building and using communal stone bathhouse saunas.

Here, in this Iron Age village (c. 500 BCE to 200 CE), Citania Briteiros, there are two surviving bathhouses of similar design, one on the eastern slope and one on the south side of the hilltop fortress village. The water for the bathhouses originated from a spring near the top of the hill, the top of the stone village, and it ran down one side of the main street in a stone-lined ditch, maybe a foot across, topped with stone slabs to keep the water clean. The eastern bathhouse, discovered in 1932, was drastically damaged by the road construction during which it was discovered. While the southern bathhouse has been raided of important artifacts, many of these carved stone pieces are on display in a local museum dedicated to the Citanias (Castro) Culture – the Museu da Cultura Castreja in Sao Salvador de Briteiros, Portugal. Let’s take a closer look at these remarkable buildings and talk about what is known about the people who used them.

The southern bathhouse was the size of a large 19th century chicken coup, a long and relatively narrow building built of stone. The building, half recessed into the hillside, was divided into 4 sections; three sections were under a roof made of huge stone slabs leaning on the central roof beam. Let’s say you wanted to get cleaned up. Talk is this was a daily ritual. Or you were participating in an elaborate religious, or cultural, ritual. You walked down the stone-lined main street to the bathhouse. You entered an uncovered stone patio, the atrium, where the water from the spring was stored in a stone-lined water tank with stone retaining walls on the sides. Then you entered the three roomed bathhouse itself. In the first room, the antechamber, you would undress and rub your body with oils and hang your clothes on pegs. You could feel the heat coming from the next room separated from you by a huge stone slab – a single stone forming the interior wall, running from the floor to the roof helping to carry the weight of the stone slab ceiling and known as a “Pedras Formosa”. This stone slab constituted the entire interior wall between the antechamber and the sauna room and was decorated with elaborate carvings.

In the center of the bottom of this stone slab wall was the doorway smaller than the entrance to an igloo, and you had to crawl though this opening to get into the sauna or the bathhouse proper. This bathroom was full of hot steam from the burning in the final room, the furnace room, where a fire was maintained and water from the spring was poured on the hot stones to make the steam. The furnace room had a chimney. So you crawled through this little opening above the stone slab floor and you were in this hot steam and you rubbed yourself down with whatever fabric was available, and you did whatever, as there are no accounts of the actual events, and you left back through the same small doorway, took a dip in the cold water tank fed by the spring and applied oils to your skin, once again, and put your clothes back on.

This general practice of the bath comes to us from an account by the 1st Century Greek geographer Strabo, but the true meaning of the bathing rituals is not known, nor can it be determined if this was a practice limited to the ruling, or priestly class, nor if it was segregated by age or sex. We just do not know.

What we do know is that across the Iron Age Celtiberian Castro culture, stretching from the Douro River in Portugal up through coastline of Galicia and over the Bay of Biscay Spain to the Pyrenees Mountains, the bathhouse was a common feature of the fortified hilltop villages. While most of the Castros have been destroyed and the locations of the bathhouses lost to time, it is assumed most of these villages did have one or more bathhouses along the lines similar to those found at Citania Briteiros. We know so little of ourselves.