Before names, there were marks

A cave for two human species

Los Casares cave opens about three kilometres from Riba de Saelices. It extends for nearly 265 metres: a large entrance chamber of around thirty metres, reached by daylight, a first chamber of about twenty, and then a tall, narrow passage.

Its first known inhabitants were not like us. Neanderthals occupied it in the Middle Paleolithic. Excavations have uncovered their stone tools, bones of the animals they ate, and a bone from one individual’s hand. Thousands of years later, modern humans entered, and it was they who engraved and painted the walls. Javier Alcolea and Manuel Alcaraz, the University of Alcalá researchers excavating the cave, therefore call it “a cave for two human species”: two species that used it at different times, without meeting there.

Horses, signs and people

Juan Cabré brought the art of Los Casares to public attention in the 1930s. It belongs to the Upper Paleolithic, roughly 30,000 to 11,000 years ago, and shares techniques and styles with art elsewhere in the Peninsula and southern France. It has two distinctive features, however: abstract signs characteristic of the Peninsula’s interior and, above all, a group of human figures uncommon in art of that period. Since 2014, new excavations and a meticulous examination of the walls have revealed more animals, signs and human figures that had previously gone unnoticed.

The Geopark guide highlights another unusual feature. Los Casares and La Hoz cave, in Santa María del Espino, stand at over a thousand metres above sea level, making them the highest sites with Paleolithic art in Europe. The people who engraved there knew how to live in a climate that could be very harsh. La Hoz cave, discovered by Cabré in 1933, contains around two hundred engravings and is closed to protect them.

Los Casares did not remain empty afterwards. Inside are Chalcolithic remains from between four and three thousand years ago, and in the 10th century a settlement of al-Andalus with a tower was built on the hillside.

Hunting scenes in the open air

The art that came later is found in rock shelters open to daylight. It is more recent, dating from roughly 8,000 to 4,000 years ago, and has two styles. Levantine art depicts people and animals naturalistically, sometimes in hunting scenes. Schematic art reduces human figures, suns, snakes and signs to a few strokes.

Both appear in the rock shelters of Rillo de Gallo, near Molina: Rillo I, also called El Llano, and Rillo II. At El Llano there are eleven figures, including Levantine humans and animals and a schematic cross-shaped figure. These are among the westernmost examples of Levantine art. Since 1998, they have formed part of the World Heritage Site covering the rock art of the Mediterranean Basin.

At Peña Escrita, in Canales de Molina, an inclined slab about thirty metres long above a stream is covered with large engraved human-shaped figures. Locally they are said to be “of the Moors”, but their date is uncertain.

How to see them

Los Casares requires a guided visit and advance booking; visit times are listed on its page. La Hoz cave is closed. The shelters at Rillo and Peña Escrita are outdoors: do not touch them, wet them to see them better, or mark them. What came next, the fortified settlements of the Iron Age, is told in the Celtiberians. The time before any humans is in Before us.