---
title: "Under the Graffiti of a Catalan Show Cave, 280 Ice Age Engravings Waited to Be Seen"
description: "At Cova de la Font Major, visitors carved their names over horses, deer and a rare bear. A new study counts 55 animal figures on the walls"
author: "Jan Sokol"
published: 2026-11-05T21:00:35Z
modified: 2026-11-06T15:44:54Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/under-the-graffiti-of-a-catalan-show-cave-280-ice-age-engrav-b903b1
language: en
tags: ["archaeology", "history", "art", "spain", "europe"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# Under the Graffiti of a Catalan Show Cave, 280 Ice Age Engravings Waited to Be Seen

*At Cova de la Font Major, visitors carved their names over horses, deer and a rare bear. A new study counts 55 animal figures on the walls*

By Jan Sokol · November 5, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/under-the-graffiti-of-a-catalan-show-cave-280-ice-age-engrav-b903b1

## In brief

- Archaeologist Josep Maria Vergès Bosch spotted Paleolithic engravings among tourist graffiti at Cova de la Font Major on October 30, 2019
- A study in Antiquity records 280 graphic elements in five sectors, including 55 animal figures such as horses, deer, an aurochs and a bear
- The engravings are not directly dated; radiocarbon dates put people in the cave between about 40,800 and 25,900 years ago
- Font Major is now the third-largest Paleolithic cave art assemblage on Iberia’s Mediterranean side, after Ardales and La Pileta
- Tourist access has been restricted, and galleries filled with sediment may hold more engravings

Beneath the town of Espluga de Francolí, in Catalonia in north-eastern Spain, a cave runs back into the dark, and for more than sixty years people have walked through it. Its main entrance was reopened in 1957, the same year Scientific American gives for its first excavation. In 1993 it became an established tourist attraction. People had been going in long before that: according to [Phys.org’s account of the study](https://phys.org/news/2026-10-hundreds-ice-age-art-engravings.html), visitors have entered it since the 12th century AD. Some of them scratched their names into the walls, and the dates of their visits, the way people do in caves everywhere.

They were writing over horses.

On October 30, 2019, as [Leman Altuntaş reports for Arkeonews](https://arkeonews.net/280-ice-age-cave-engravings-hidden-in-plain-sight-in-spain/), the archaeologist Josep Maria Vergès Bosch saw something odd among the modern graffiti in a section of the cave called Gatoneres de Cal Palletes. Several of the incisions had the features of Paleolithic art. That section lay on the tourist route. “For more than six decades, thousands of visitors passed directly in front of the engraved surfaces,” Vergès said. Now he and Míriam Salas-Altès have published a full account in the journal *Antiquity*. Its title begins with two words that work as a programme: “Filling gaps.”

![A torch-bearing explorer illuminates a large horse engraving on a rugged cave wall, rendered in black and golden tones.](https://rews.cc/img/e13441f56cbf0b5d6df59807f8f04da3f8979178.webp)

## Seeing in the dark

How did the figures go unseen for so long? Salas-Altès, a doctoral student at the University of Rovira i Virgili and the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES-CERCA), offered some reasons [to Jackie Flynn Mogensen of *Scientific American*](https://scientificamerican.com/article/hundreds-of-stunning-ice-age-drawings-discovered-inside-spanish-cave/). In a dark cave, an engraving is harder to spot than a painting. Even a forward-facing helmet lamp may not bring out the lines. And the walls, she said, are “full” of graffiti, so that to an untrained eye the ancient cuts and the modern ones look much alike. Specialists also had their own blind spot: for years they believed the cave’s irregular walls were unsuited to extensive engraving.

A reflection, offered only as one: each age writes on the walls it inherits, and each tends to assume that whatever came before it left nothing worth reading. The tourists of the twentieth century added their names to a surface they took to be blank. The Ice Age engravers had got there first.

## What the walls hold

The researchers recorded 280 graphic elements in five sectors of the cave, about 250 metres from the present entrance. Fifty-five are animals: horses, deer, wild cattle and goat-like creatures. One shows a bear, its ears drawn from the front and its mouth slightly open. Another shows the front half of an aurochs, the extinct wild ox, with horns and ears also seen face-on. Not every animal gives up its identity. About 30 percent of the figures lack enough anatomical detail to classify, and another 15 percent could belong to more than one group. The rest of the marks are parallel lines, geometric shapes and abstract signs. One panel carries hundreds of loop-shaped incisions whose age and origin remain uncertain.

![A textured woodcut-style illustration shows a large bear, an antlered deer, a wild goat, and a horned bovine among flowing black, tan, and rust-colored bands.](https://rews.cc/img/9bcf7976a1ea85c86a61afbfc93aab668d2b5632.webp)

Most of the animals are between 15 and 45 centimetres long, cut in grooves three to seven millimetres wide. The cave is largely made of rough conglomerate, but softer bands of marl gave the engravers something they could cut. They did not prepare the walls. They incised straight into the stone, sometimes adding broader scraping. In places they seem to have used the rock itself. In one horse, the boundary between two layers appears to serve as the ground under its hooves. A deer’s head comes down toward a horizontal crack that may stand for a ground line or for water. The researchers say they cannot prove the artist meant it.

## The question of time

The engravings have not been dated directly. Radiocarbon dates from the deeper galleries show people were in the cave between roughly 40,800 and 25,900 years ago. Some of the figures, in the way their heads and limbs are drawn, resemble art from the periods before the Magdalenian. Taken together, the evidence points to earlier phases of the Upper Paleolithic, though the authors do not rule out that some figures are Magdalenian or later. Press coverage has been less careful: [the *Olive Press*](https://www.theolivepress.es/spain-news/2026/11/06/hundreds-of-prehistoric-engravings-discovered-in-catalunya-cave/) headlined the engravings as 19,000 years old, a figure the paper’s own hedged chronology does not establish. A firmer answer may come from one animal lying beneath a calcite crust, which might allow uranium-series dating.

![A textured illustration shows a cavern with hanging stalactites, a falling droplet, and flowing layers of cream, red, and black rock.](https://rews.cc/img/bafc8ebb1bbc4a647e4fe7b342809c4ceba61eb6.webp)

## A map redrawn

Before this find, only two cave figures in Catalonia had been tentatively attributed to the Upper Paleolithic. Most of Spain’s Ice Age art had come from the Franco-Cantabrian north, with rich sites in the south as well. In the north-east there was almost nothing. Vergès put it plainly: the Paleolithic rock art found there “has been very scarce.”

With 55 animals, Font Major now ranks third among Paleolithic cave art assemblages on the Mediterranean side of the peninsula, behind Ardales and La Pileta in Málaga province, [according to Archaeology Magazine](https://archaeologymag.com/2026/11/hundreds-of-ice-age-engravings-in-catalan-cave/). The scale matters because of what surrounds it. “Around 75% of known assemblages contain no more than five zoomorphic figures, and over 90% contain no more than 20,” Salas-Altès said. “Contrary to what was previously thought, northeastern Iberia holds first-rate Paleolithic rock art sites.” She sees in it evidence of “a Mediterranean graphic tradition with an identity of its own, distinct from that of the Franco-Cantabrian region”, one of several recent finds that have sent researchers back to look again at old Iberian walls, as at [Penascosa in the Côa valley](https://rews.cc/a/at-penascosa-27-000-year-old-pigments-ask-whether-the-coa-s--6b0543).

“It was a big surprise,” Salas-Altès told *Scientific American*. The search has already moved on. Work at nearby Cova Simanya has turned up further traces of Paleolithic graphic expression. Tourist access to Font Major has been restricted to protect the engravings. What the cave was for remains open: shelter, ritual, or something else, she said.

Some of its galleries have filled with sediment over the millennia. Nobody has yet seen what is on their walls.

## Sources

- [280 Ice Age Cave Engravings Hidden in Plain Sight in Spain](https://arkeonews.net/280-ice-age-cave-engravings-hidden-in-plain-sight-in-spain/) — arkeonews.net
- [Hundreds of stunning ice age drawings discovered inside Spanish cave](https://scientificamerican.com/article/hundreds-of-stunning-ice-age-drawings-discovered-inside-spanish-cave/) — scientificamerican.com