From Tyre to Tarshish: The Phoenicians in Spain

Home > Magazines > BAR > Summer 2025

By the late ninth century BCE, Phoenicians from Tyre and Sidon had established a robust Mediterranean trade network. In southern Iberia—likely biblical Tarshish—they established a coastal settlement at Cerro del Villar. Archaeology reveals a thriving commercial port that developed fruitful relations with local communities while preserving the traditions and customs of the Phoenician homeland.

Please join the BAS Library or become an All Access member of BAS to gain full access to this article and so much more.

Join the BAS Library!

Already a library member? Log in here.

Institution user? Log in with your IP address or Username

Endnotes

1. See Sebastián Celestino and Carolina López-Ruiz, Tartessos and the Phoenicians in Iberia (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2016), and Carolina López-Ruiz, “Tarshish and Tartessos Revisited: Textual Problems and Historical Implications,” in M. Dietler and C. López-Ruiz, eds., Colonial Encounters in Ancient Iberia: Phoenician, Greek, and Indigenous Relations (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2009), pp. 255–280.

2. María E. Aubet, “El Sistema colonial fenicio y sus pautas de organización,” Mainake 28 (2006), p. 38.

3. For further discussion, see Fanni Faegersten and Carolina López-Ruiz, “New insights on the ‘Volute Capital’ Motif: Its Materials, Meaning, and Contexts in the Phoenician World and Beyond,” Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology and Heritage Studies 11.2–3 (2023), pp. 229–255.

4. M. Álvarez-Martí-Aguilar et al., “Archaeological and Geophysical Evidence of a High-Energy Marine Event at the Phoenician Site of Cerro del Villar (Malaga, Spain),” in M. Álvarez-Martí-Aguilar and F. Machuca Prieto, eds., Historical Earthquakes, Tsunamis and Archaeology in the Iberian Peninsula (Singapore: Springer, 2022), pp. 179–201.