Arde Lucus Festival in Lugo Spain

The "Arde Lucus" (also written as Arde Lvcvs) is a festival held in Lugo (Spain) in mid-June that revives the Roman and Castroian past of the walled city, and which emerged to commemorate the founding of the city. The first edition was held in 2001.

In 2017, it was declared Festival of National Tourist Interest1 and in its last two editions it reached almost one million participants.

The Arde Lucus, began its journey in the year MMII linked to the summer solstice and with a primary objective: to remember the founding of our city recreating its Roman past. The ludic and cultural aspects are combined, with the greatest possible historical rigor. The historic walled town is transformed, every year for three days, in Lucus Augusti, a major city of Roman Gallaecia, offering visitors a complete program of activities, in an incomparable setting such as the Wall, which charges during the party a special role.

HISTORY

Fourteen years before our era, the legate Paulo Fabio Máximo founded in the name of the Emperor of Rome the city of Lucus Augusti, in a place near the Miño, the largest river in Galicia. This is the capital of the Lucense Juridical Convent, that is to say, the northwest of a great Gallaecia that extended in the south to the Douro River. The gold mines of Gallaecia were a very important base of the imperial economy, and Lucus Augusti became an important city of the province. Three centuries later, the urban structure of the city was modified and moved slightly, although coinciding in the highest part with the previous floor. They were critical times from the political and military point of view. New defenses were erected: a wall of more than two kilometers in perimeter, crowned by 85 powerful towers.

When the Empire fell, Roman Gallaecia was the territorial base of the Suevian monarchy, the first kingdom that organized on the European imperial ruins. Lugo was then an important Episcopal see, which -according to some- would come to share the condition of metropolitan with that of Braga.

It seems that at the beginning of the 8th century the Muslims arrived at a destination in Lugo, but soon returned to the south. The history of these years continues to be a mystery, and the figure of Bishop Odoario has much of legendary. It is known that in 842 a large Galician army met in Lugo and conquered Oviedo and enthroned Ramiro I, the first king of the Galician dynasty of the western Spanish monarchy.