COVALANA CAVE

Certainly the most moving rock paintings on the Iberian Peninsula. While the gallery is smaller than in other caves and smaller paintings, they have been imagined and realized not as isolated drawings but as a true work of art thought with subjects communicating with each other and with the visitor as the latter moves into the cave. The light games and the shapes of the walls are studied to give the best effects of movements and the best possible prospects. It is really great art that you are advised to discover on a guided tour so that you don't lose much of the details that make Covalanas a special cave. The narrow gallery imposes small groups, 7 or 8 people, which encourages contact with works as with the guide. Rarely you will have the opportunity to be so close to original paintings in such a good state of conservation!

The cave is 2.5 km from the city center. A very pleasant hiking trail allows you to walk there on foot with a little more than 200 m. It's a good way to take the time to discover the beautiful panoramas surrounding the cave. It is believed that many populations inhabited caves in the prehistoric era. A total of 14 caves adorned with paintings or engravings were found in the vicinity.

Covalanas is a space entirely dedicated to painting, some kind of prehistoric cinema or museum. Research actually showed that the places of habitation were lower on the mountain, and only paint tools were found in the cave itself. The artist or artists came here only to exercise their art, for the purpose that we still do not know. In any case, they painted in a place where the only way to see the paintings was to bring the light. At 65 meters from the entrance of the cave, the gallery was actually plunged into the darkness, and lighting lamps had to contribute to giving movement effects to the represented animals.

The paintings would be 7,000 years more than Altamira bison and Lascaux mammoths. Animals represented here are deer and biches, animals placed very high in mammalian pantheon depicted on Hispanic walls. The technique used is that of pointillism: you will notice that the strokes are not full but made up of points of points obtained by affixing the thumb, coated with manganese oxide, on the wall. There are twenty figures, including a bison and a horse, all of which are biches or deer. While it is difficult of course to interpret the will of the artist, you will notice that the overall schema answers a plan and the choice of locations is not insignificant. Animals seem to look at us, get away or get closer to us, depending on where we are in the gallery, without any failure in the plot. At some distances, the biches of the entrance to the gallery may sound real, as the guet while the others already run on our arrival. The motives of Covalanas' artist will certainly never be known, and if the cave visit does not provide answers, it has at least the merit of prompting us to question the meaning of these paintings and the message they give us.