A hill in the northwest of Murcia is prompting historians to reconsider some of the most settled assumptions about the early centuries of Al-Andalus. Excavations at Cerro de la Virgen de Calasparra, in south-eastern Spain, have uncovered an early Christian church that not only survived the Muslim conquest of 713 but remained in use for nearly two more centuries.
The study, published in the scientific journal Salduie by researchers David Martínez and Rubén Fernández, documents a church founded around the first half of the 5th century that appears to have kept its religious function until at least the 9th century. If that timeline is fully confirmed, it would rank among the strongest evidence yet for the continuity of Christian worship in the Iberian Peninsula during the first years of Moorish rule.
The church came to light through prospecting and excavation campaigns carried out in the area since 2021. Archaeologists describe it as a single-nave building with a tripartite chancel, a layout they consider typical of certain late antique churches. The authors point to notable parallels with Visigothic churches such as Santa Cristina de Lena in Asturias, and note that the sacristies and apses echo some parochial and episcopal churches in Syria, a sign of how similar architectural models circulated across the Mediterranean in late antiquity.
More Than a Matter of Dates
Radiocarbon dating places the building’s construction between 410 and 440 AD, a chronology supported by ceramic and stratigraphic analysis pointing to prolonged occupation. The site had already drawn attention in earlier campaigns, when a striking early Christian bronze lamp shaped like a eucharistic dove was unearthed and hailed as an exceptional find in the European context.
The most significant part of the new study, however, is not the church’s age but its survival after the Muslim conquest. Many traditional accounts have framed the arrival of Moorish troops in the early 8th century as a sharp rupture with Visigothic traditions. The Calasparra evidence suggests something more complicated.
The researchers found no indication that the church was converted into a mosque or that it quickly lost its religious purpose. The presence of storage containers and cooking pottery, they argue, should not be read as evidence that the building was desacralised or turned into Islamic housing. Instead, such materials point to continued use of the space for community practices that combined worship with the management of resources. Their central conclusion is that the typological and stratigraphic study of the ceramics shows the church’s liturgical character enduring well into the 9th century.
The work situates this phenomenon within the kūra of Tudmīr, the administrative entity that emerged from the pact signed in 713 between the Muslim authorities and the Visigothic nobleman Theodemir. That agreement allowed many Christian communities to keep part of their political, religious and economic structures for a time, in exchange for paying taxes.
Christian Faith, Muslim Taxes
Taxation turns out to be another key to understanding the site. Among the recovered materials are scales, weights and other objects tied to economic control and tax collection. One weight even carries an Arabic inscription that translates as “justice belongs to God.”
These finds show that Cerro de la Virgen served a purpose well beyond the religious. Its commanding position over important routes and local farmland made it a hub of territorial and economic organisation. The Christian community that used the church, in other words, was also woven into the fiscal machinery of the new Andalusi power. As the authors put it bluntly, the hill was a Christian community subject to the taxes of the Islamic state and required to integrate into regional fiscal and commercial networks.
For the researchers, Calasparra helps illuminate how the islamisation of peninsular society actually unfolded. Rather than an immediate replacement of populations or institutions, the process appears to have played out over decades of adaptation, coexistence and gradual change. The Christian population, they explain, found itself caught between two converging forces: the growing ability of the Andalusi state to reorganise the territory and secure tax revenue, and islamisation itself as a route toward social and legal accommodation.
The study concludes that these Christian communities did not necessarily vanish through destruction or expulsion, but through a slow absorption into the new Andalusi society. The ecclesiastical hierarchy, Martínez and Fernández write, proved unable to sustain the favourable terms secured at the time of the conquest, while ever more centralised and efficient fiscal structures, along with the growing pull of Córdoba, eroded the economic base of churches, monasteries and Christian elites.
More than 13 centuries on, the ruins of Cerro de la Virgen open a fresh window onto one of the most decisive periods in the history of the Iberian Peninsula. They suggest that the transition from the Visigothic world to Al-Andalus was, at least in some regions, far more gradual, negotiated and complex than long assumed.
