Located beneath the San Cayetano Cemetery, this archaeological site was discovered during the construction of the cemetery and excavated between 1990 and 1991. The excavations revealed an extensive Roman villa used for agricultural and industrial purposes, situated close to the Roman city of Suel.

The site extends across a plain that occupies part of the Fuengirola River’s floodplain, on the southern slope of a small hill where the farmhouse that gave the site its name once stood.

Among the remains uncovered are two rooms featuring hypocaust systems—an ancient Roman heating system used in baths, consisting of a raised double floor through which hot air circulated from a room containing a furnace—as well as a large pool. Two tombs belonging to a nearby necropolis were also discovered.

The archaeological materials found at the site span more than 2,100 years of history, from the Punic period through the medieval period, although the most significant period of occupation was the Roman era.

This archaeological site must have been of considerable importance due to its proximity to the Roman city of Suel, whose exact location has not yet been identified. In ancient times, Suel was situated near the mouth of the river that was known as the Suel and is now called the Fuengirola River.

To understand the site, however, we need to travel back approximately 2,000 years and consider what the surrounding landscape looked like at that time. Studies carried out in the 1980s by the German Archaeological Institute have made it possible to approximately reconstruct the coastline of two millennia ago. The entire area now occupied by the Fuengirola River, from its present-day mouth to Cortijo del Ahogadero, was once a large marine estuary. As a result, the archaeological site was located very close to the ancient coastline—in other words, the sea reached almost to its doorstep.

In the 18th century, the Marquis of Valdeflores placed the ruins of Suel in the Campillo del Val de Suel (the valley of the Suel River), approximately a quarter of a legua (1,500 metres) from Fuengirola Castle. There, he discovered an aqueduct bearing a Latin inscription, which has since disappeared. This distance of 1,500 metres corresponds exactly to the distance between Fuengirola Castle and the Finca Acebedo Roman site, where an aqueduct still exists today and could possibly be the same one described by Valdeflores.

A funerary altar was also found at this site bearing the female name Aemilia Aemiliana Suelinata, indicating that she was from Suel. This provides further evidence of the close connection between the archaeological site and the ancient Roman city.

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