Prehistoryc. 24,000 BC · Cova de la Font Major, L'Espluga de Francolí, Catalonia, Spain
280 Ice Age engravings found in a Spanish show cave that tourists walked past for 60 years
Hidden among modern graffiti in the Cova de la Font Major in Catalonia, the carvings include 55 animals and make the region far richer in Ice Age art than thought.
In brief 3 key points
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- 280 Ice Age engravings, including 55 animals, in a Catalan cave
- Catalonia had only two known Ice Age figures before
- Some visitors carved their names over the ancient lines
Archaeologists have described 280 Ice Age engravings, including 55 animals, in a cave in Catalonia, north-eastern Spain, that has been open to visitors since 1957. Josep Maria Vergès Bosch and Míriam Salas-Altès of the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES-CERCA) published the study in the journal Antiquity on 5 November.
The cave, the Cova de la Font Major, lies beneath the village of L'Espluga de Francolí. More than 3.5 km of its galleries have been mapped. Nature reports that the engravings date back around 26,000 years. The authors assign many of the figures to phases before the Magdalenian, the last great period of Ice Age art.
Spotted among the graffiti
Vergès noticed the engravings on 30 October 2019, during a planned excavation. They sit among many modern engravings and graffiti in a group of small galleries about 250 metres from the entrance.
The entrance probably collapsed in the Roman period. The town council cleared it in 1957, and the galleries with the art later became part of a tourist Adventure Route. The cave was turned into a museum in 1993. For more than six decades thousands of visitors passed the engraved walls, and some cut names and dates over them.
“When you shine a light straight on the engravings, they are really difficult to see, you have to play with light from different directions to see the depressions.”
Míriam Salas-Altès, IPHES-CERCA, to Nature
The cave walls are mostly rough conglomerate, long thought unsuitable for engraving. The art is cut only into thin, soft layers of marl between the conglomerate. Most grooves are 3 to 7 mm wide and shallow.
Horses, a bear and an aurochs
The animals include a horse, a bear and an aurochs, the wild ancestor of cattle. There are also many signs and swirling lines. In some figures the artists used natural lines in the rock. One forms the ground under a horse.
More than half of Europe's Ice Age cave art lies in the Iberian Peninsula, but mostly in the north and in Andalusia. Before this find, only two Ice Age wall images were known from Catalonia, and one of them was stolen soon after its discovery. Font Major now ranks among the largest groups of Ice Age cave art on Spain's Mediterranean side.
The authors argue the find shows the region was not empty of art or people. Damage from visitors suggests the original number of engravings was larger than the 280 that survive.
Sources (3)
Peer-reviewed paperfrom IPHES-CERCA
- Hundreds of Ice Age engravings discovered in a Catalan cave visitors walked past for decades (Archaeology News)
- The palaeo cave art that hid in plain sight for 26,000 years (Bluesky buzz)
- 280 Ice Age engravings found in a Catalan cave people have visited since the 12th century (Antiquity)
Paper: Vergès Bosch JM, Salas-Altès M. Filling gaps: the Palaeolithic rock art of the Cova de la Font Major on the north-east Iberian Peninsula. Antiquity (2026). DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2026.10447
Edited by Guiseppe Weijermars
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