Siega Verde

Siega Verde is an open-air rock art ensemble located on the banks of the Águeda River, a tributary of the Douro, in the municipality of Villar de la Yegua, province of Salamanca (Castile and León, Spain). Although it lies in Spanish territory, it is just a few kilometers from the Portuguese border at Vilar Formoso and is closely linked, culturally and heritage-wise, to the Paleolithic engravings of the Côa Valley, with which it shares chronology, technique, and international recognition.

A Paleolithic sanctuary in the open air

Identified in 1988 by archaeologist Manuel Santonja Gómez during an archaeological survey, the site comprises about ninety panels with over five hundred representations distributed along approximately one kilometer of schist outcrops near the Águeda River. The engravings are predominantly zoomorphic: horses, aurochs, deer, goats, and other species from the last Ice Age, executed mainly through pecking and fine incisions.

Most of the figures are attributed to the Upper Paleolithic, with a central core dating to the Gravettian period, around twenty thousand years ago, and later representations from the Magdalenian. This long diachrony makes Siega Verde, like the Côa, an exceptional record of the continuity of human symbolic expression over millennia.

The great lesson of Siega Verde and the Côa is that Paleolithic art did not exist only in the secrecy of caves: it also flourished in daylight, engraved on the rocks of river valleys that structured the lives of hunter-gatherers.

Technique and iconography

Unlike the parietal art of Franco-Cantabrian caves, the engravings of Siega Verde were created on exposed surfaces, on the rocky walls flanking the river. The dominant technique is pecking, achieved by repeated percussion with a lithic tool, producing outlines formed by aligned small depressions; fine incisions, traced with sharp-pointed objects, also appear.

The engraved bestiary largely coincides with the repertoire of Paleolithic rock art in Iberia, fitting into the tradition of animal figuration that spans the Upper Paleolithic across Europe. The stylistic convergence with the Côa, separated from Siega Verde only by the border, demonstrates that both ensembles belong to the same cultural horizon, shared by communities that moved through the valleys of the Douro and its tributaries.

World Heritage designation

Recognized by the Junta of Castile and León as a Bien de Interés Cultural in 1998, Siega Verde was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2010, as an extension of the Côa Valley site—classified in 1998. This extension transformed the property into a cross-border Portuguese-Spanish ensemble, designated “Prehistoric Rock Art Sites of the Côa Valley and Siega Verde,” uniting under a single classification the two most remarkable concentrations of prehistoric art in the open air on the Iberian Peninsula.

The joint management of the two ensembles underscores the unity of a cultural territory that political borders do not interrupt. For visitors, Siega Verde constitutes a natural complement to the discovery of the Côa engravings, allowing them to understand, on both sides of the border, the truly Paleolithic dimension of this extraordinary archive engraved in stone.