Continuing from my last post… we left Pinhão and the Alto Douro by bus on a slow and very curvy road through (again) endless hills covered with vineyards and schist walls. Our destination was a UNESCO World Heritage Site (again), this time the “Prehistoric Rock Art Sites in the Côa Valley and Siega Verde”. Prehistoric rock art is not something that I go out of my way to see and, accordingly, there was a lot (for me) to learn.
Along a 30km stretch of the Côa River (which I guess also includes the Siega Verde area in Spain?), archaeologists have found about 96 rock art sites. For me the most amazing thing was that these sites were only discovered quite recently (about 30 years ago) when work was going on to build a dam in the area. Portugal actually stopped construction of the dam and turned the area into an outdoor museum that’s now a (somewhat popular?) tourist site. Wow, how many countries would abandon dam plans to preserve 20,000 year old lines etched into the stone? Very impressive.
Of course, stopping a dam didn’t happen without public pressure and some scandal, the dam advocates keeping the rock art sites secret from the public and the scientific community, then claiming the sites weren’t really as old as the archaeologists claimed. The Côa Valley Wikipedia page describes the case in a little detail. It’s always a fight.
There’s no point visiting the art without a guide. Most of the pictures are of animals, but they’re superimposed one on top of another and vary in size. Our guide had sketches of the art with different colors for each animal, and then he’d trace the entire line on the rock with his pointer. Even then it was sometimes hard to see what he was talking about.
