Talayotic Culture of Minorca
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How it came to be
On Menorca in the western Mediterranean, settlements and burial places survive from the Bronze Age, around 1600 BCE, to the Late Iron Age in 123 BCE. Over this time islanders developed a 'cyclopean' architecture of very large stone blocks. The best-known structure, the talayot, is a large truncated conical stone tower; on Menorca most have no interior chamber. They also built sanctuaries called taulas, horseshoe-shaped enclosures with a huge T-shaped stone pillar at the centre.
Later the islanders traded with Greeks, Phoenicians and Carthaginians, and villages gained defensive works. The settlement of Trepucó was destroyed during the Second Punic War and abandoned suddenly. In 1818 Juan Ramis published Celtic Antiquities of the Island of Menorca, the first book written entirely in Spanish on prehistory. The first excavations using scientific methods took place in the 1930s at Trepucó and Sa Torreta de Tramuntana.
In 2023, 280 sites in nine zones of the island and their surrounding landscapes were inscribed as a World Heritage site, covering about 5% of the island. The astronomical orientation of the structures and the lines of sight between them point to networks that may have had cosmological meaning.
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