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Welcome to the Galician-Roman site of Castromao, the ancient Coelióbriga, the capital of the Coelerni people, one of the indigenous communities that inhabited the kingdom of Gallaecia during the Iron Age and Romanization.


The Coelerni were one of the ten civitates or Galician communities that made up the Conventus of Brácara Augusta, with its capital in the present-day Braga, one of the three legal convents into which the Romans divided Gallaecia.
Castromao is a prehistoric city that was inhabited between 700-600 BC and 200-300 AD. It covers an area of 2.26 hectares and is protected by a perimeter wall, although the archaeological structures located, far exceed this defensive element.


Around an upper platform where Bronze Age remains (2,500-800 BC) were found along with a chapel from the Modern period, the Galician-Roman archaeological structures are located on successive stepped platforms separated by retaining walls. .
The best known area is the lower terrace located within the city walls, and this is the site where most of the archaeological work was carried out from the 1920s to 2008.
This excavated area represents a quarter of the total surface of the intramural site. In this area, a total of 136 structures were documented, of which ,about 80 correspond to dwellings or storage buildings, forming up to 36 family units, complexes or communities in which between 4 and 6 people would live. In any case, outside the walled enclosure and below the current village of Castromao, remains of more structures have been found, so the extension of the town would have been much greater than that delimited by the wall.
Extrapolating this information to the entire area of ​​the settlement, we can suppose that at the peak of its life it could have been inhabited by approximately 500 people, to which we would have to add many others who would have resided in the exterior buildings, and could have reached a figure of 800 to 1,000 inhabitants around the 1st century BC to the 1st AD.

Padrão dos Povos
In Padrão dos Povos de Chaves (Portugal), a Roman epigraphic column dated to the year 79 AD, there cited the names of the ten civitates or pre-Roman civilisations that constituted the Bracarense convent. One of them is the Coelerni.