About twenty kilometres north-west of Tarifa, at the foot of a long dune above the beach of Bolonia, lie the remains of one of the best-preserved Roman cities on the Atlantic coast. Baelo Claudia was a small but wealthy town of the first and second centuries AD, with a forum, basilica, theatre, temples to Isis and the Capitoline Triad, and an extensive fish-salting industry. An earthquake in the third century shut it down, and the site stayed buried until the 1920s.
A small museum at the entrance handles tickets and gives context; the ruins themselves are stretched along a thousand metres of low coast and can be walked in a couple of hours. The setting alone — a half-excavated Roman town between a perfect white-sand beach and a tawny mountain — is reason enough to come. Combine the visit with a swim and lunch in the beach restaurants at Bolonia for one of the better days out from Tarifa.