Rock Art of the Mediterranean Basin on the Iberian Peninsula
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How it came to be
Along the Mediterranean side of the Iberian Peninsula, late prehistoric people painted on the walls of shallow rock shelters. The inscription covers 758 sites spread along more than 1,000 km of coast from Catalonia to Andalusia and in the mountains inland. In red, black and a little white and yellow, they painted hunting, honey gathering, battles, executions, dances and rituals, with fine lines 1-3 mm wide drawn with feathers or plant fibres.
This Levantine art was first found in Teruel in 1903, and Juan Cabré, its first student, classed it as a regional Palaeolithic art. That view was challenged, partly because no Ice Age animals appear. Antonio Beltrán Martínez and others placed its start in the Mesolithic and its peak in the Neolithic, and the dating is still debated.
In 1908 Ramon Huguet, rector of the village of El Cogul, found the paintings of Roca dels Moros, and a report came out the same year. Its scene of nine women around a small male figure is known as the Dance of Cogul. Later inscriptions in Iberian script and Latin show it was used as a sanctuary into Roman times. In 1998 the rock-art sites across six autonomous communities were inscribed.
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