Tourists carved their names in a Spanish cave for 60 years before someone noticed 280 Ice Age drawings hiding on the walls

A Catalan cave open since 1957 holds 280 engravings, 55 of them animals, probably from the Ice Age and found among modern graffiti in 2019.

On Oct. 30, 2019, during the first excavation campaign of a new project, one of the study's authors, visiting the Cova de la Font Major in Catalonia, noticed what looked like Ice Age engravings among the modern graffiti on a passage wall.

The find was a surprise to the team. The cave had been open since January 1957, and that passage had been part of a tourist route since 1993.

Researchers have now counted 280 motifs there, including 55 animal figures. The authors attribute them to the Ice Age, but no engraving has been dated directly, so that age rests on archaeological context and drawing style.

Cleared by the town in 1957

The cave lies under the village of L'Espluga de Francolí, in the Conca de Barberà district of Tarragona province. It belongs to a limestone system with 11,780 feet (3,590 meters) of mapped galleries, where the Francolí River rises.

Its entrance probably collapsed in Roman times. In 1853 people got in through the Pou del Palletes, a private well in the courtyard of a town house, and members of the Centre Excursionista Pirinenc surveyed the cave in 1956.

The town council cleared the blocked entrance in January 1957, using machinery and no archaeological supervision. Those works destroyed a large part of the deposit at the entrance. A hoard of bronze objects then drew visitors, cavers and treasure hunters.

In 1993 the cave became a museum, and the passage known as the Gatoneres de Cal Palletes joined a tourist circuit called the Adventure Route.

The Coves de l'Espluga website now lists that route as a caving-style visit along the underground river, running from April or May 2027.

For more than six decades, thousands of people walked past the engraved panels, and some cut names and dates over them.

They did so "without the Palaeolithic origin of the figures being recognised," wrote Josep Maria Vergès Bosch and Míriam Salas-Altès, of the IPHES-CERCA institute in Tarragona and Rovira i Virgili University.

Soft marl between the conglomerate

The engravings sit about 820 feet (250 meters) from the entrance, in an enclosed space next to the underground river. Three narrow passages connect these small galleries to the main gallery.

Ceilings there run from under 3 feet (1 meter) to about 10 feet (3 meters). The galleries average about 6.5 feet (2 meters) across.

Most of the cave's walls are conglomerate, a lumpy rock generally considered a poor surface for prehistoric art. The engravers worked only on layers of marl, a soft limy mudstone, set between the conglomerate beds.

Any reasonably hard tool could cut a line in that marl. High-resolution 3D models show that most grooves measure 0.1 to 0.3 inches (3 to 7 millimeters) wide and are shallow. About 80 percent of the figures run 6 to 18 inches (150 to 450 millimeters) long.

The same softness left the panels exposed to fingers, modern graffiti and accidental knocks. Every sector except the last stretch of sector 5 shows that damage, and the authors suspect the original total was higher than 280.

Horses, deer and one bear

Ramon Viñas helped the two authors prospect and record the walls, with logistical support from the cave's guides and the L'Espluga tourism office. Most of what they logged is not figurative, mainly parallel lines in groups of two, three or four, and sets of 15 to 40 strokes.

Sector 5 has 33 of the 55 animals. The list includes horses, caprines, female deer, bovids and one bear, with its ears drawn from the front and its mouth slightly open.

The authors could not name a species group for 30 percent of the animals, and they list another 15 percent as one of two options, such as caprine or deer. Eyes, nostrils and hooves are mostly missing from the outlines, and a few bellies look pregnant.

A horse in sector 5 has its feet on the boundary between conglomerate and marl. In sector 3, a deer's muzzle touches a horizontal fissure, and the paper proposes it as ground or water, while saying that intent cannot be demonstrated.

Panel 2 of sector 2 holds hundreds of loop-shaped marks that have no clear parallels at other Paleolithic sites. An inscription dated 1199 sits on top of them, and a piece of charcoal from one groove gave a date no later than the 17th century, so the authors leave their origin open.

Charcoal from 41,000 years ago

Radiocarbon dates from the inner galleries fall into two groups. One spans roughly 41,000 to 26,000 years ago, and the other runs from the eighth to the second century BCE.

Most of the older dates come from charcoal found near the Sala del Llac and downstream, with an apparent gap from 35,400 to 26,300 years ago.

A layer dated to about 26,000 years ago in the Galeria del Pessebre also yielded a flint backed bladelet. None of this charcoal comes from the engravings, so the dates show that people were in the galleries, not when the walls were cut.

The later group belongs to an Iron Age sanctuary in the Sala del Llac, where people left hundreds of ceramic vessels, metal objects, goat or sheep limbs and grain. One vessel held wine residue.

The drawings give a second clue. Hind legs shaped like a double Y and heads made of three lines also turn up at Mediterranean sites of the pre-Magdalenian phases, about 43,000 to 19,000 years ago.

Recent digs at sites such as Cova Foradada have also filled in the early Upper Paleolithic of southern Catalonia, a territory once treated as marginal for that period.

Third behind Ardales and La Pileta

Until this find, only two wall images from the Upper Paleolithic were known in all of Catalonia. A black bovid at Cova del Tendo was stolen shortly after its discovery and survives in photographs and a tracing, while a possible deer at Cova de la Taverna has an uncertain human origin.

About 75 percent of known sites along Iberia's Mediterranean side hold five animal figures or fewer, and more than 90 percent hold no more than 20. With 55, Font Major ranks third on that coast, behind Ardales and La Pileta in the far south.

The find sent researchers to check other caves, and a survey at Cova Simanya also turned up Paleolithic marks. Elsewhere in Spain, the cave of Cova Dones has yielded at least 120 Latin inscriptions in a single chamber.

The authors concluded that "no cave should be dismissed a priori," whatever the quality of its walls or the number of its visitors.

Uranium dating happens next

At least one animal lies under a calcite crust that could allow uranium-series dating, which the team plans for a later stage.

Similar crusts were used to argue that Neanderthals made paintings in three Spanish caves more than 64,000 years ago, a reading other specialists rejected, and a natural varnish on the horse paintings at Chauvet Cave was recently detected under ultraviolet light.

The authors caution that one date would not fix the age of the whole collection. They also say it is too early to rule out engravings from the Magdalenian or later periods, and a full study of the panels is under way.

More than 62 years passed between the day the town council cleared the entrance and the day a member of the research team stopped at those walls.

The full study was published in the journal Antiquity.

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