The Most Remarkable Rock Art Sites in the World

16 places in 15 countries · updated 13 October 2026

1. 01 Rock Drawings in Valcamonica

   Incisioni rupestri della Val Camonica

   Italy46.024° N 10.350° E

   

   Valcamonica, the long valley of the river Oglio in the Lombard Alps, holds one of the largest collections of prehistoric rock art in the world. When it was inscribed in 1979 it became Italy's first World Heritage Site, with more than 140,000 figures recognised; continued survey has since pushed the catalogue to somewhere between 200,000 and 300,000 engravings. They were pecked into rock surfaces smoothed by Alpine glaciers — sloping slabs of bedrock and large erratic boulders — and together they form a picture chronicle that runs from after the Ice Age through the Neolithic, Copper, Bronze and Iron Ages, and on, in scattered later marks, into historical times.

   Did you know? Most of the engravings were made by pecking: a hammer-like stone or metal tool struck rows of tiny round pits into the rock surface.

   More about Rock Drawings in Valcamonica →

2. 02 Tanum Rock Carvings

   Hällristningsområdet i Tanum

   Sweden58.700° N 11.336° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   In the granite hills around Tanumshede, in the province of Bohuslän on Sweden's west coast, thousands of figures were hammered into smooth rock faces during the Nordic Bronze Age, roughly between 1700 and 300 BC. They are spread over some 600 panels along a belt of about 25 kilometres, and together they form one of the richest collections of prehistoric rock art in Europe, a World Heritage Site since 1994. The carvings are shallow pecked grooves, and many of the best known have been filled with red paint to make them legible — a practice that critics say sacrifices the stone's original appearance to visibility.

   Did you know? At Litsleby a spear-wielding figure 2.3 metres tall, the so-called Spear God, is the largest carved human figure in northern Europe.

   More about Tanum Rock Carvings →

3. 03 Rock carvings at Alta

   Norway · 3 km from Alta69.947° N 23.188° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   When the first figures were spotted on the shore rocks of Alta in the autumn of 1973, nobody expected the scale of what followed. More than 6,000 carvings have since been found at several sites around the head of the Altafjord in Finnmark, and the site is Norway's only prehistoric World Heritage Site, inscribed in 1985. The main locality at Jiepmaluokta, a Northern Sami name meaning "bay of seals", alone holds more than 3,000 figures.

   Did you know? One Alta panel shows what is thought to be the world's oldest depiction of a hunting fence, carved roughly 7,000 years ago.

   More about Rock carvings at Alta →

4. 04 Ubirr

   Australia12.409° S 132.959° E

   

   Ubirr is a cluster of sandstone outcrops on the northeastern edge of Kakadu National Park, where shallow overhangs facing the Nadab floodplain have served for millennia as both shelter and canvas. Aboriginal people have painted and repainted these walls over an immense span of time; much of what is visible today is a couple of thousand years old, and some images were renewed into the twentieth century. Kakadu as a whole holds more than 5,000 recorded art sites, and Ubirr, together with Burrunguy (Nourlangie), is counted among the most important of them. The park, owned largely by its Aboriginal traditional owners and managed jointly with Parks Australia, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site for both its natural and cultural values.

   Did you know? The outcrop was once known as Obiri Rock, the name given to it by the ethnographer C. P. Mountford.

   More about Ubirr →

5. 05 Twyfelfontein

   Namibia20.596° S 14.373° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   Twyfelfontein is a narrow valley of red sandstone in Namibia's Kunene Region, in the country once known as Damaraland, and its rocks carry one of the largest concentrations of engraved rock art in Africa. Scattered across boulders and slabs on the slopes are thousands of individual images — an early survey in 1950 counted at least 2,500, and later estimates run above 5,000 — grouped into more than a dozen separate sites within the valley. In 2007 it became Namibia's first World Heritage Site.

   Did you know? Some engravings were once read as a sea lion and penguins, hinting at journeys to a coast over 100 km away, though later surveys doubt this.

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6. 06 Côa Valley Rock Art

   Parque Arqueológico do Côa

   Portugal41.033° N 7.117° W

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   In the steep, dry valley of the Côa River in northeastern Portugal, among vineyards, hundreds of animals are carved, incised and pecked into the rock outcrops along the riverbanks. Horses, aurochs, red deer and ibex walk, graze and turn their heads across the rock faces, some pieced out in bold hammered outlines, others in lines so fine they appear only when low sun rakes across the stone. This is one of the largest collections of Palaeolithic art in the open air anywhere in Europe: the earliest images date back more than twenty thousand years, and engraving continued in the valley through later prehistory down to the Bronze Age.

   Did you know? At Fariseu a panel of 82 engraved animals was found partly sealed under undisturbed Ice Age sediment layers, proving the figures were carved more than about 21,000 years ago.

   More about Côa Valley Rock Art →

7. 07 Laas Gaal

   Somalia9.780° N 44.443° E

   

   A low outcrop of red granite rises from the dry plain between Hargeisa and Berbera, and under its overhangs hides one of the richest galleries of prehistoric painting in the Horn of Africa. More than a thousand figures cover the walls of the shallow shelters at Laas Geel: cattle in profile with lyre-shaped or hooped horns, heavy udders and long necks hung with what looks like a decorated breastplate, some of them draped in ceremonial cloths. The colours are still strong – red and yellow ochre, white, black and even green – because the granite roofs have kept sun and rain off the rock for thousands of years.

   Did you know? A French survey team led by archaeologist Xavier Gutherz was first shown the painted shelters on 4 December 2002, guided there by local people from the nearby village of Daarbudhuq.

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8. 08 Newspaper Rock

   Newspaper Rock State Historic Monument

   United States37.988° N 109.518° W

   

   Newspaper Rock is a single panel of sandstone, but it holds one of the densest concentrations of rock art in the American Southwest. On a vertical face of Wingate sandstone about 200 square feet in area, beside Indian Creek in southeastern Utah, more than 650 figures crowd against each other: deer, bison and pronghorn, human figures, riders and a host of abstract symbols whose meaning is lost. The cliff is coated in dark desert varnish, a thin mineral film built up over centuries, and each figure was made by pecking through that dark skin to the pale rock underneath, so the images stand out almost like print on a page.

   Did you know? Look closely and you will find many footprints with six toes, a motif researchers link to the inherited condition of polydactyly.

   More about Newspaper Rock →

9. 09 Saimaluu-Tash petroglyphs

   Kyrgyzstan41.181° N 73.814° E

   

   Saimaluu-Tash, "the patterned stones" in Kyrgyz, is one of the great rock-art galleries of Asia, and one of the hardest to reach. High in the Fergana Range, at around 3,200 metres, two alpine valleys separated by a low ridge are strewn with boulders of dark rock, and on more than ten thousand of them people pecked images through the glossy black and grey desert varnish to the paler stone beneath. Estimates of the number of figures run as high as 98,000.

   Did you know? The rock art can be dated with confidence only from the first millennium BC, when the Saka-Scythian 'animal style' appears on the stones.

   More about Saimaluu-Tash petroglyphs →

10. 10 Bangudae Petroglyphs

    South Korea · 13.9 km from Ulsan35.604° N 129.178° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    On a sheer rock face above a bend of the Daegokcheon stream in Ulsan, someone began carving whales around seven thousand years ago — and people kept adding to the panel for millennia. The main surface at Bangudae Terrace is only about eight metres wide and five high, yet it holds some three hundred engraved figures, among the richest prehistoric image walls in East Asia. It was found in 1971 by a university team investigating Buddhist sites, a year after the same researchers had recorded geometric carvings at Cheonjeon-ri, about two kilometres upstream.

    Did you know? One carving shows a mother grey whale carrying her calf on her back, the way the species lifts its young to the surface to breathe.

    More about Bangudae Petroglyphs →

11. 11 Kbal Spean

    Cambodia · 39.7 km from Siem Reap13.687° N 104.015° E

    

    In the forested Kulen Hills northeast of Angkor, a small river runs over a bed of sandstone carved nearly a thousand years ago. Kbal Spean – "bridge head", after a natural sandstone arch over the stream – is a stretch of roughly 150 metres in which the riverbed and banks were turned into sculpture: reclining Vishnu on the serpent Ananta with Lakshmi at his feet, Brahma on a lotus rising from Vishnu's navel, Shiva and his consort Uma riding the bull Nandi, alongside Rama, Hanuman, frogs and crocodiles. When the water drops after the rainy season, the figures surface from the current one by one.

    Did you know? In the main field of lingas, five are set in a quincunx, an arrangement that, like the central towers of Angkor Wat, stands for the cosmic Mount Meru.

    More about Kbal Spean →

12. 12 Ingá Stone

    Pedra do Ingá

    Brazil · 34.2 km from Campina Grande7.325° S 35.585° W

    

    The Ingá Stone — Pedra do Ingá, or Itacoatiara do Ingá, from the Tupi for "painted" or "scratched stone" — is a long outcrop of gneiss lying in the bed of the Ingá river in the interior of Paraíba, north-eastern Brazil, and it carries one of the most remarkable sets of rock carvings in South America. Its main face is a vertical wall some 46 m long and nearly 4 m high, and across a section of it about 15 m long the rock is almost entirely covered with engraved signs. Unlike much rock art, these are not faint scratches: the grooves are broad, deep and carefully polished, as if worked over and over.

    Did you know? The engraved grooves on the main panel are up to 5 cm wide and about 8 mm deep, and were carefully polished smooth.

    More about Ingá Stone →

13. 13 Dabous Giraffes

    Girafes de Dabous

    Niger18.030° N 7.581° E

    

    On a low sandstone outcrop on the western edge of the Aïr Mountains in northern Niger, two giraffes have been cut into the rock at almost life size. The larger stands about six metres tall, which makes the pair the largest known animal petroglyphs in the world. They are a male and a female, drawn in clean, confident outline with the patterned coat, the long neck and even details of the head picked out in the stone, with a precision that suggests people who knew these animals well. Seen in the low light of early morning or evening, when the grooves fill with shadow, the animals seem to step out of the stone.

    Did you know? A thin line runs from each giraffe's mouth to the head of a small human-like figure, a detail whose meaning is still debated.

    More about Dabous Giraffes →

14. 14 Wadi Mathendous

    Libya25.763° N 12.170° E

    

    Deep in the Libyan Sahara, the Messak Settafet — a dark sandstone plateau rising between the Ubari and Murzuq sand seas — is cut by dry valleys whose walls carry some of the finest prehistoric engravings in Africa. Wadi Mathendous is the most celebrated of them. Along its rocky banks, hunters and herders of a green Sahara carved the animals of a landscape that no longer exists: elephants, giraffes, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, crocodiles, wild asses, great cats, and the extinct long-horned buffalo that gave its name to the so-called Bubaline period of Saharan rock art.

    Did you know? The German explorer Heinrich Barth found these engravings in 1850, as the first European to cross the Messak plateau from east to west.

    More about Wadi Mathendous →

15. 15 Onega petroglyphs

    Russia61.673° N 36.029° E

    

    On the low rocky headlands of Lake Onega's eastern shore, just above the waterline, thousands of figures were pecked into the rock some five to six thousand years ago: swans with long necks, elk, fish, boats, people, and strange beings that are half human and half animal. These are the Onega petroglyphs, among the richest collections of prehistoric rock art in Fennoscandia and, since 2021, part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site "Petroglyphs of Lake Onega and the White Sea".

    Did you know? In 1935 four pieces of rock carrying carvings were cut from Cape Peri Nos and shipped to the Hermitage; explosives used in the work destroyed some figures.

    More about Onega petroglyphs →

16. 16 Murujuga National Park

    Australia · 16.7 km from Karratha20.583° S 116.833° E

    

    On the Burrup Peninsula in the Pilbara, piles of rust-red boulders tumble down the hillsides like the ruins of some giant's wall — and a startling number of them are engraved. Murujuga, the Aboriginal name for the peninsula and the surrounding Dampier Archipelago, holds what is regarded as the densest concentration of petroglyphs anywhere on Earth: estimates run to more than a million engravings, possibly two million, spread over a cultural landscape of about 100,000 hectares. Murujuga National Park, declared on 17 January 2013 as Western Australia's hundredth national park, protects a core of just under 49 square kilometres, and in July 2025 the wider Murujuga Cultural Landscape was inscribed on the World Heritage List.

    Did you know? The peninsula was an island, named Dampier Island after the navigator William Dampier, until a road and rail causeway joined it to the mainland in 1963.

    More about Murujuga National Park →