More than 4,000 fragments from wall paintings have been recovered in the excavation of a 2nd century Roman villa in the Barberes Sud area of Villajoyosa, on the southeastern coast of Spain. The fragments are only beginning to be puzzled back together by conservators at the Vilamuseu, the city’s archaeological museum, but they already reveal rich decorations of plant garlands, birds and imitation architectural features like fluted columns with curved stucco decoration that give the murals a 3D appearance. The work, carried out on a total of 842 m² [9063 square feet], has allowed the archaeologists to discover part of the floor plan of the villa, built during the reign of the emperor Trajan, with a part for industrial use, a patio or atrium with different rooms (probably for the use of the servants) and finally a large open-air space, porticoed with large columns, destined for the garden of the house, and surrounded by stately rooms, which at the time were richly decorated. Only the foundations of this part remain. The walls were built with rammed earth (rammed clay), and appeared to have collapsed inside the rooms and the porticoed courtyard. One of the stately rooms preserved the entire collapse of its walls, the excavation of which was a very thorough task as fragments of painted plaster were preserved. Each fragment or group of fragments was consolidated by the company’s own restorers and that of Vilamuseu, prior to their extraction, and each of the layers of stucco was numbered and photogrammetrically measured (undistorted, full-scale photograph) to locate them, which will give an idea of the original composition. Built on a hilltop overlooking the beach on what is today’s Spain’s glamorous Costa Blanca, Villajoyosa’s origins date back to the Bronze Age. In the 7th century B.C., the Phoenicians founded a colony there, the 8th known in Spain, as a stepping stone on the coastal trade route to their colony of Gadir (modern-day Cádiz) on Atlantic side of the Strait of Gibraltar. The local Celtiberian population called the city Alon, known as Alonis in Greek, and had a shrine at the site from at least the 4th century B.C., but the Phoenicians were still there, as the remains of a Carthaginian industrial site dating to the 3rd century have been found there. After Carthage’s defeat in the Second Punic War (218-210 B.C.), its territories in southern Spain fell under Roman control, becoming part of the new province of Hispania Citerior. A Roman cohort built a military fort there during the Sertorian Wars in 83 B.C. and they controlled access to Alon’s seaport. Under Rome, the city prospered from trade, thanks to its location on the Mediterranean and connection to land routes, and in 74 A.D. was granted privileged status as Municipium by the emperor Vespasian. The imperial era city was grand, with a monumental temples, public baths, a new commercial port and associated business district, a quarry, an aqueduct and numerous country and suburban luxury homes. The Barberes Sur villa was a suburban estate on the Via Lucentina, the road that linked Alonis to Lucentum (modern-day Alicante). A surviving stretch of the road 28 feet long and 14 feet wide was discovered in 2017 and in 2020 the restored road was opened as an open-air museum. Under the foundations of the villa archaeologists found deep pits where gravel was dug out to build the Lucentum Road. They were filled in when the villa was built. While the excavation of the villa continues, volunteers are helping conservators clean the fragments and help with the consolidation and reconstruction of the mural panels in the museum’s restoration laboratory.