Rock Art of the Côa Valley

In the final stretch of the River Côa, a tributary of the Douro, the schist slopes of the municipality of Vila Nova de Foz Côa, in the district of Guarda, preserve the largest known complex of open-air Palaeolithic art on the planet. Spread across some eighty sites and more than a thousand engraved rocks, the Côa figures (horses, aurochs, deer and Iberian ibex) open a rare window onto the imaginary world of the hunter-gatherer communities that inhabited the northwestern Iberian Peninsula more than twenty thousand years ago. Their discovery and preservation at the end of the twentieth century constitute one of the most significant episodes in European archaeology.

A Discovery That Halted a Dam

The modern history of the Côa begins at the end of 1991, when the archaeologist Nelson Rebanda, who was monitoring work on a dam intended to submerge the valley, identified the first engraved rock at Canada do Inferno, on the left bank of the river near its mouth. Shepherds and millers had long known those marks, but they lacked the means to date them. The discovery was not made public until November 1994, and as the extent and antiquity of the panels became apparent, an intense national and international controversy arose, pitting hydroelectric development against the protection of an exceptional archaeological testimony.

The phrase “rock engravings cannot swim,” which circulated during the 1995 controversy, captured a founding principle: a rock art site only makes sense when preserved in its context, in the rock and landscape that gave it rise.

In November 1995 the Government suspended the works and, in 1996, definitively abandoned the dam and created the Côa Valley Archaeological Park to manage, protect and publicise the complex. It was one of the most significant cases in the recent history of Portuguese archaeology, and the story of the civic campaign itself is told in detail in the essay on the Côa rock art.

The Palaeolithic Engraved in Stone

The great majority of the figures date from the Upper Palaeolithic, roughly between 22,000 and 10,000 BC, spanning phases such as the Gravettian, the Solutrean and the Magdalenian. The predominant techniques are pecking, fine incision and abrasion, executed directly on vertical schist panels. Through the superimposition of lines and multiple outlines, as in the famous two-headed horse of Canada do Inferno, some authors have suggested an intention to represent movement.

The bestiary is dominated by four species (the horse, the aurochs, the deer and the Iberian ibex), which brings Côa close to the figurative universe of Palaeolithic rock art in the Franco-Cantabrian caves, with one essential difference: here the art was engraved in daylight, not inside caves as at Lascaux or Altamira. This condition, long considered unlikely to survive, calls for careful attention to light: many panels reveal their lines fully only in the late afternoon or under raking light.

The Côa was saved not because it is beautiful, but because it is legible: every horse, aurochs or ibex engraved on the schist is a document on the thinking of the hunter-gatherers of the end of the last glaciation.

The continuity of human occupation has made the valley a palimpsest. Over the Palaeolithic figures lie engravings from later periods, from the Neolithic to the Bronze and Iron Ages, and even historical periods, which places Côa within the broader panorama of prehistoric art in Portugal.

National Monument and World Heritage

The group of archaeological sites in the valley was classified as a National Monument by Decree No. 32/97, of 2 July 1997. In December 1998 it was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List, under reference 866, under criteria (i) and (iii): a masterpiece of human creative genius and an exceptional testimony to a cultural tradition. In 2010, the inscription was extended to include the Spanish site of Siega Verde, beside the River Águeda in the province of Salamanca, forming a transboundary property named Prehistoric Rock Art Sites of the Côa Valley and Siega Verde, which underlines the unity of this artistic tradition along the two rivers.

Visiting the Côa Valley

Access to the panels is exclusively by guided tour, in small groups and in off-road vehicles, departing from the Côa Museum, opened in 2010 above the river’s mouth. Three sites are regularly open to the public:

• Canada do Inferno, near Vila Nova de Foz Côa, where it all began and where the landscape still shows the scars of the interrupted dam;
• Penascosa, in Castelo Melhor, also visitable at dusk, when raking light brings the lines to the surface;
• Ribeira de Piscos, in Muxagata.

More than a museum of objects, the Côa is a site to be read in the landscape: the engravings remain on the rocks where they were made, conserved in situ, a management choice explained on the page about the Côa Valley archaeological site. There, archaeology, the river and the Douro vineyards intertwine in one of the most distinctive places in prehistoric Europe, in an unbroken dialogue between the schist and the memory of the first communities who left their mark here.