A garden at the edge of the world
In legend, the Garden of the Hesperides, where golden apples grew under the guard of a dragon, lay at Lixus. Classical writers also placed here the home of the giant Antaeus, and the wrestling match in which Hercules defeated him.
A dragon read as a river
Pliny the Elder, writing in the 1st century AD, recorded these stories. He suggested that the dragon guarding the garden stood for the estuary, which winds through the plain below the hill in many loops.
Legend and the ruins
These are legends, not history. What you can see today is the work of people who lived here over more than two thousand years: walls, temples, an amphitheatre and the vats where fish was salted. From the top of the hill, the river’s loops are easy to picture as the coils of a dragon.
