280 Ice Age engravings found in a Catalan cave visited for centuries

Archaeologists have recognised 280 Palaeolithic motifs on the walls of Cova de la Font Major in Catalonia, a cave that people have visited for centuries without noticing them. The engravings form the largest concentration of Ice Age wall art known in Catalonia and the third-largest on the Mediterranean side of the Iberian Peninsula. The team, led from the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES-CERCA), reports the work in the journal Antiquity.

A well-known cave with an unrecognised record

Written sources and visitor traces show that the cave has attracted people since the 12th century AD. From 1957 it was frequented by visitors, speleologists and treasure hunters, and in 1993 it was opened as a tourist attraction. Even so, no Ice Age art had been reported there, and the cave walls were thought unsuitable for such engraving.

According to co-author Josep Maria Vergès, thousands of people walked past the engraved surfaces over six decades. Some added their own names and dates on top, unaware that the figures were prehistoric.

Filling a gap on the map

The Iberian Peninsula holds more than half of all documented Upper Palaeolithic cave art in Europe, but the distribution is highly uneven. Much of it lies in the Franco-Cantabrian region, spanning northern Spain and south-western France. Before this study, only two Palaeolithic representations were known from the whole of Catalonia, so the 280 motifs change the regional picture considerably.

Co-author Míriam Salas-Altès put the scale in context. Along the Iberian Mediterranean seaboard, from the Pyrenees to Gibraltar, about 75% of known assemblages hold no more than five animal figures, and over 90% hold no more than 20. By that measure, Cova de la Font Major is a clear outlier.

A tradition with its own character

The authors compared the motifs with Franco-Cantabrian art and found them different. On that basis, they argue that the engravings belong to a separate Palaeolithic graphic tradition rather than a peripheral version of the better-known northern one. They describe it as the first demonstration that north-eastern Iberia had artistic customs of its own.

The quantity of art may also say something about people. The researchers suggest that a region long regarded as marginal could have been densely occupied during the Palaeolithic. This would alter how the western Mediterranean is placed within wider models of Ice Age settlement and symbolic behaviour. That inference is presented as a possibility, not a settled conclusion.

Why it matters, and what remains open

The case is a reminder that absence of evidence in the rock art record can reflect a lack of close examination rather than a lack of art. A cave with decades of heavy visitation and a tourism history still held an unrecognised body of engravings. That raises the prospect that other accessible sites in under-surveyed regions, including caves long dismissed as unpromising, may repay a fresh look.

The summary of the study does not detail how the engravings were dated, what subjects they depict or how many are animal figures. Those points, along with the stylistic comparisons behind the claim of a distinct tradition, will matter for specialists assessing the argument. Future work will probably test whether similar engravings occur in neighbouring caves and how this assemblage relates to Palaeolithic occupation evidence in Catalonia.

The paper is Josep Maria Vergès Bosch and colleagues, "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.

Source: Hundreds of Ice Age rock art engravings discovered hidden in plain sight (Phys.org, 5 November 2026).

Image: AI-generated illustration.