The east coast of Spain is not an obvious place to go hunting for Ice Age cave art. While the country is renowned for the striking visions of animals and shapes gracing sites such as Altamira and El Castillo, these repositories of ancient artistry are not evenly distributed. Instead, more than 70% of the Ice Age cave-art sites known in the world are concentrated in a relatively modest band of northern Spain and southern France. It is a very different story along Spain’s Mediterranean face. There, the star of the show is the cave of Parpalló, but it is a curiosity in many ways. Rather than serving as a canvas for the great tableaux of wild animals dominating popular perceptions of Ice Age imagery, the cave was home to an extraordinary collection of portable art. This included more than 5,000 individual limestone plaques adorned with red and yellow pigments that sketched out animals or abstract designs. When it comes to paintings or engravings on cave walls, the pickings are rather slimmer. Only nine certain sites have been detected along Spain’s east coast, and just three of these boast actual paintings, with the rest containing engravings. Given that such a seemingly barren area would appear a poor bet for a systematic survey project, it is little wonder that the recent discovery of a major cave-art site at Cova Dones, near Valencia, came from no more than a fortuitous trip to an intriguing local landmark.
Underground art scene
‘In 2021, I was working with some mobiliary Palaeolithic art material in a nearby museum,’ remembers Aitor Ruiz-Redondo, a senior lecturer at the University of Zaragoza. ‘One day, I went on a field trip with my colleagues Virginia Barciela – who is a lecturer at the University of Alicante, so she had all of the local knowledge – and Ximo Martorell. We visited some sites, including the cave at Cova Dones, and Virginia told me “I first came here 20 years ago and it seemed promising, because it is a rare deep cave in the area. I was just starting out back then and didn’t really have any time, so why don’t we go back and check it out now?” It proved to be a great choice on her part, because sure enough there was something in there. The art was not easy to recognise, but I saw there were some red lines, and then Ximo found an aurochs painting. It wasn’t on the scale of the ones that you see at Lascaux or somewhere like that. Instead, it was just five red lines sketching out the shape of the animal. In 2023, we returned to Cova Dones to resume work. At first, it looked like there were only two or three paintings, so we thought that we could record everything in a few days. It didn’t work out that way, though. When we realised the full magnitude of what we had found, those few days turned into six weeks of fieldwork – and we’re still not finished. I think it will take another three or four years to do it all.’
Cova Dones was not an archaeological blank slate when Aitor and Virginia visited. Back in the 1960s, Iron Age pottery had been found there, and the site was interpreted as an example of a phenomenon known as ‘Iberian cave sanctuaries’. As the name suggests, these are believed to be a product of some sort of ritual activity, resulting in finds being deposited at subterranean sites that are associated with water. While the precise nature of these prehistoric pursuits remains unclear, the presence of pottery well inside the cave certainly hints at something a little more unusual than standard occupation. After all, humans tend not to live deep underground, where it is dark and often damp. Instead, when a cave is selected as a home, it is usually the portion around the entrance that becomes the focus for day-to-day domestic doings. From there, humans generally only venture further into the Stygian depths when they have some sort of special purpose in mind.
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