Visitors' graffiti hid a gallery of Palaeolithic carvings in a Catalan cave for decades

In the Cova de la Font Major in L'Espluga de Francolí, a Catalan cave that has welcomed visitors since 1957 and has had a tourist route since 1993, archaeologists have described 280 incised Palaeolithic motifs, including 55 animal figures. The study by Josep Maria Vergès and Míriam Salas-Altès of the Catalan institute IPHES-CERCA and the Universitat Rovira i Virgili was published in the journal Antiquity, Archaeology Magazine and La Brújula Verde report.

Vergès discovered the engravings in 2019 during excavations, after a colleague pointed him to a side chamber where adventurers in wetsuits were emerging from an opening, Gizmodo writes. Among the names and dates that visitors had scratched into the walls since 1957, he spotted older lines. The figures are hard to see in the frontal light of a headlamp. A guide who had been there hundreds of times had never noticed the horse.

The carvings show horses, ibex, deer and possibly aurochs, as well as a rare bear depicted from the front. Direct dating is still lacking. Based on style and radiocarbon dates of human presence in the cave, the researchers estimate the engravings to be at least 19,000 years old, according to Gizmodo. It is the third-largest collection of Palaeolithic wall art on the Iberian Mediterranean coast. Until now only two figures from that period were known in Catalonia, and the authors see a distinct Mediterranean style, separate from the Franco-Cantabrian tradition.