280 Ice Age engravings hid among tourist graffiti in a Spanish cave for 60 years

For more than six decades, visitors to a show cave beneath the Catalan town of L’Espluga de Francolí squeezed through a cramped side gallery and left their names and dates scratched into its soft walls. Hidden among that graffiti were two hundred and eighty Ice Age engravings, fifty-five of them animals, and nobody recognized a single one.

The find, described by archaeologists Josep Maria Vergès and Míriam Salas-Altès in the journal Antiquity, makes the Cova de la Font Major the third-largest collection of Paleolithic cave art on Spain’s entire Mediterranean side. Until it turned up, Catalonia had only two known Ice Age wall images, and one of them had been stolen shortly after it was found.

That near-blank map was never a small curiosity. More than half of the Paleolithic wall art recorded in Europe sits in the Iberian Peninsula, but it clusters in Cantabria, the Basque Country and Andalusia. The northeast looked empty, and archaeologists often explained that silence by assuming few people lived there before about 19,000 years ago.

The engravings at Font Major undercut that assumption. They include horses, wild goats or ibex, deer that are mostly female, aurochs and a bear, a rare animal in Ice Age art, drawn with its ears facing forward and its mouth slightly open. Several animals appear to carry swollen, pregnant bellies.

How a tourist gallery hid its oldest art

The engravings sit in the Gatoneres de Cal Palletes, a cluster of low, narrow galleries about 250 meters from the cave entrance, beside an underground river. Ceilings range from under a meter to about three meters, and the walls are a lumpy mix of conglomerate rock and thin, soft layers of marl.

Vergès spotted the first figures while supervising an excavation, after hearing about tourists in wetsuits emerging from the side passage on the cave’s guided Adventure Route. “Upon entering, I saw that the walls were covered with names and dates engraved by people who had passed through the gallery,” he told Gizmodo. When he took off his helmet and angled his headlamp across the wall, older lines appeared, then more of them.

Experts had written the cave off. Bumpy conglomerate walls are usually considered poor surfaces for engraving, and a cave walked by thousands of people was assumed to have no secrets left. The researchers think lighting did the rest: frontal light, the kind visitors and guides carry, flattens shallow grooves, while modern scratches stand out. “In fact, it is a question of how the brain filters and structures visual information,” the pair told Gizmodo, adding that one veteran guide who had entered the gallery hundreds of times had never noticed the horse.

How they did it

The team split the engraved area into five sectors and numbered panels, then built high-resolution 3D models of the walls. Measured on those models, most grooves are three to seven millimeters wide and shallow, cut by simple incision or by scraping. About 80 percent of the animal figures measure 15 to 45 centimeters long.

Every engraving sits on the soft marl bands, which take a line from almost any hard tool. The artists seem to have used the rock itself as part of the drawing. In one figure, the edge of a conglomerate layer serves as the ground under a horse’s hooves; in another, a deer’s muzzle dips into a horizontal crack that may stand for the ground or a water surface.

To place the art in time, the researchers radiocarbon-dated charcoal, bone and other material from across the cave and compared the figures’ drawing conventions with dated sites elsewhere in Mediterranean Spain and France.

Why the numbers matter

Along the Iberian Mediterranean coast, from the Pyrenees to Gibraltar, about 75 percent of known Paleolithic art sites contain five animal figures or fewer, and more than 90 percent have no more than twenty. Font Major has fifty-five, with thirty-three packed into a single sector. Only Ardales and La Pileta, both in Andalusia at the peninsula’s southern tip, have more.

That makes Font Major the first, and so far only, major Ice Age art site in eastern Iberia. It also lies about five kilometers from Molí del Salt, a site known for engraved stones made much later, between about 13,500 and 8,700 years ago. “Contrary to what was previously thought, north-eastern Iberia holds first-rate Palaeolithic rock art sites,” the researchers told Gizmodo.

What the study doesn’t settle

The age is the biggest open question. No engraving has been dated directly. The authors base their estimate on style: animals with “double Y” legs and heads outlined with three lines, conventions linked elsewhere to the pre-Magdalenian phases of the Upper Paleolithic, which ended roughly 19,000 years ago. Radiocarbon dates show people inside the deep galleries between about 41,000 and 35,200 years ago and again around 26,000 years ago, with no trace of anyone there for many thousands of years afterward. That is why some reports say “at least 19,000 years” and others say “26,000 years.” Neither figure is a measured age of the art.

The authors also stress that later engravings, from the Magdalenian period or after, cannot yet be ruled out. Hundreds of loop-shaped marks in one panel have no clear Paleolithic parallel, and charcoal found inside one groove shows that at least some of those incisions are no later than the seventeenth century.

Identification is shaky too. Of the fifty-five animals, 30 percent could not be assigned to any species and another 15 percent sit between two candidates, such as goat or deer. And because graffiti and hands have worn the walls, the original set was probably larger than what survives.

A cave with a very long visitor log

The cave’s main entrance collapsed, probably in Roman times. A medieval inscription dated 1199 shows people still reached the inner galleries, possibly through a fissure where a private well was later dug. Explorers entered that well in 1853, and in January 1957 the town council dug out the old entrance with machinery and no archaeological supervision, destroying part of the deposits. The cave became a museum in 1993, and the engraved galleries joined its Adventure Route that same year.

Vergès noticed the first engravings on 30 October 2019, during the first excavation season of a regional research project. The paper was published online on 5 November 2026. Deeper inside the same cave, an Iron Age sanctuary in the Lake Chamber has yielded hundreds of offering vessels, one with traces of wine.

Common questions about the Font Major cave engravings

Where is the Cova de la Font Major?

It lies beneath L’Espluga de Francolí, in the Conca de Barberà area of Tarragona province in Catalonia, northeast Spain. It belongs to the Coves de l’Espluga cave system, which has about 3.6 kilometers of mapped passages, and the Francolí River rises inside it.

How old is the cave art at Font Major?

Its age has not been measured directly. Drawing style and radiocarbon dates from the deep galleries point to the earlier Upper Paleolithic, so the engravings are probably more than 19,000 years old and could be considerably older. Uranium-series dating of one calcite-covered figure is planned.

Can visitors see the Ice Age engravings?

The rest of the show cave remains a museum, but Gizmodo reports that the engraved gallery is not open to the public because its walls are too fragile.

Why did nobody notice the engravings for so long?

The lines are shallow, sit among modern graffiti and almost vanish under the frontal light of a headlamp. Experts also assumed the cave’s rough walls were unsuitable for engraving, so nobody looked closely.

What comes next

A full study of the assemblage is under way, along with the planned uranium-series date. The discovery has already sent the team to other caves in the region, and a survey of the nearby Cova Simanya has also turned up Paleolithic engravings.

Reference: Vergès Bosch and Salas-Altès, “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

Tags: Spain, archaeology, Ice Age, cave art, paleolithic, Catalonia