Calle Cañete: living in the historic heart of El Carmen

Calle Cañete is about seventy meters long. It leaves calle Quart just behind the towers, runs between narrow façades and stops against the wall at the end: there is no way out. Nobody passes through it. You go in and you come back.

In 1873 Manuel Carboneres published the Nomenclator de las puertas, calles y plazas de Valencia, a table in which every street takes one row of four columns: the name, where you enter, where you leave, and the names it has and has had. On page 40, between Canonge Gomis and Capellans, the row reads: Cañete, entered from Cuarte, no way out, En Bataller.¹

Beside the name it prints “A. 1600”. The book’s own key explains that the A stands for the aveinaments, the registers by which the city granted residence, and that names set in bold, as this one is, are those of streets still standing when the book was made. The name is on record in 1600; before that the street was called En Bataller.¹

Valentia was founded in 138 BC. The literary sources say that Junius Brutus led the expedition of discharged soldiers who settled it on an island in the Turia, not far from the sea.²

On the corner of calle Quart and calle Cañete there is a plot of some 500 square meters, dug between 1992 and 2000 by Pierre Guérin, Beatriz Arnau Davó and Elisa García-Prósper. It gave 267 funerary structures, among them 248 graves: close to 180 burials and 69 cremations.³

It is part of the necropolis of calle Quart, also called the Western Necropolis, the oldest cemetery found in the city so far, reckoned at some 5,000 square meters and lying about 500 meters outside the imperial Roman walls.²

The Quart-Cañete sector has three moments: an early Republican phase dated to the last third of the second century BC, a late Republican one of the first century BC, and an Imperial one running from the first to the third century AD.³

From that oldest phase, 71 burials and 12 cremations were excavated. What dates them is not an inscription but the tableware and the amphorae buried with them: transitional Greco-Italic wine amphorae, Campanian A ware, thin-walled beakers and gray jugs from the Catalan coast. Together they give a starting date in the third quarter of the second century BC, which is to say the years the city was founded.³

Among those graves are six of an uncommon kind: chamber tombs, or hypogea, a rectangular pit with a niche cut into one of its long walls, where the body lies with its grave goods. They are 3.35% of the burials excavated.³

Towards the south, towards calle Quart, the burials stop dead: the ground drops some four meters and nobody could be buried there. Towards the north, the east and the west, on the other hand, the graves carry on beyond the foundations of the buildings next door.³

In December 2025 the Universitat de València reported something new about those chamber tombs. The ones from calles Quart and Cañete, behind the towers, are of the type called grotticella, and they resemble nothing local. They do resemble, closely, those of the necropolises of the towns around Corfinio, in L’Aquila, once the capital of the Peligni, a people of central Italy.⁴

From which it follows that among the first inhabitants of Valentia there were people who had come from there. The work is by Albert Ribera, of the Institut Català d’Arqueologia Clàssica, with David Quixal and Iván Fumadó, of the department of Prehistòria, Arqueologia i Història Antiga of the Universitat de València.⁴

It was presented at the international congress La fundación de Valentia y el final de los pueblos itálicos e ibéricos, held on 13 and 14 November 2025 at the Facultat de Geografia i Història of the Universitat de València.⁵

In other words, where part of the city’s founders came from is known from how they buried their dead, and those graves are in the plot on the corner of calle Quart and calle Cañete.³

Carboneres records when a name appears and which names came before it, not why it was chosen. We also looked in Pascual Madoz’s Diccionario geográfico-estadístico-histórico, whose volume XV, of 1849, describes Valencia at length: no calle Cañete appears in it, and no En Bataller either.^{1, 6}

We are building at number 18. The block sits inside the walled enclosure, the first of the three areas by which the decree of 1993 delimits the historic ensemble of Valencia, declared an asset of cultural interest.⁷

In Ciutat Vella the ground is looked at before it is touched. The Valencian cultural heritage act, 4/1998, requires whoever promotes works that move earth in an area of archaeological vigilance to file a prior study signed by a competent technician. On the strength of that study the administration decides whether an archaeological intervention is needed before work starts, and that intervention is at the developer’s expense.⁸

At number 18 it was done. Between October and December 2025, the archaeology team dug a little over a meter below ground and found an unbroken sequence from the twelfth century to today. The oldest of it is garden plots from the Almohad period, outside the Islamic wall, dated by the pottery: a small sgraffito jug and turquoise-glazed pieces.