Castro de Viladonga

Castro de Viladonga is one of the best-preserved Celtic hill forts in northwestern Spain, sitting on a low hill about 20 kilometres southeast of Vilalba. The site covers a roughly circular area ringed by multiple concentric walls and ditches, with the internal layout still legible: you can pick out the remains of round houses, communal granaries, and enclosures for animals, grouped into districts along two main thoroughfares.

The small museum at the entrance displays the finds from decades of excavation — gold torques, fibulae, coins, necklace pendants — and does a good job of explaining what daily life in this kind of settlement actually looked like. Admission is free, and the site is rarely crowded. Allow an hour or two to walk the outer ramparts and explore the excavated structures at the centre.

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A story
The site was only discovered in 1911 when a farmer's plough turned up a gold torque bracelet, prompting excavations that have run almost continuously since the 1970s. What has emerged is an almost circular hilltop settlement of around 10,000 square metres, with concentric stone walls and ditches, occupied from the late Iron Age through the Roman period — roughly the first to fifth centuries AD.