Castro de Santa Tecla was a Castro-Roman settlement in a Galician municipality of A Guarda, Spain. The site was inhabited between 100 BC and 100 AD. Although the Romanisation process of the northwest of the Iberian peninsula had already begun at the time, the architecture of the site shows little Roman influence. The use of circular stone structures and the construction methods are the features of traditional Castro architecture.
Apart from a few rectangular ones, almost all of the structures are individual circular dwellings with small dimensions. Most of the dwellings had decorative carvings on their walls with geometric shapes such as spirals or pinwheels. As for the roof, archaeologists have found no evidence of a traditional conical roof, supported by a post. Instead, they noticed the traces of a hearth in the place of a hole that would have fixed a central post. Therefore, archeologists reached the conclusion of a roofing system that distributes its weight on the walls and not on a post.
Not all the stone structures served as a dwelling as some of them contained the remains of amphoras, a mill, carving stones, etc. These structures were probably storehouses, and they constituted family units together with residential ones. The urban architecture of the site also contained a complex drainage system under the pathways, and sometimes on the surface.
