Cueva de la Pileta

Cueva de la Pileta runs deep into a limestone hill of the Sierra de Líbar in the mountains of Ronda, and its walls carry some of the oldest paintings in southern Iberia. Lit only by hand lamps, the galleries reveal horses, goats, cattle, deer and a seal drawn in red and black, alongside abstract signs and a large fish, the cave's best-known image, painted on a wall deep in the system. Most of the figurative art is thought to date to the Upper Palaeolithic, more than 20,000 years ago, and later, simpler schematic figures show that people kept returning long after the Ice Age.

The cave owes its discovery to bats. In 1905 a local farmer, José Bullón Lobato, was searching for bat guano to use as fertiliser when he climbed down into a shaft and found galleries with painted walls and human remains. Word reached Colonel Willoughby Verner, a British officer and naturalist who explored the area, and he in turn brought the French prehistorian Henri Breuil, who went on to study and record the paintings. Spain declared the cave a national monument in 1924, the same year an easier entrance was found, and Bullón's descendants have looked after it ever since. Later work uncovered further galleries and many more paintings, some of them partly veiled by flowstone.

Part of the pleasure lies in the setting. The cave opens above the village of Benaoján in a landscape of grey crags and deep valleys on the edge of the Sierra de Grazalema. Nearby Ronda, perched on cliffs and split in two by the gorge of El Tajo, has drawn writers and painters for centuries with its 18th-century Puente Nuevo spanning the drop.

Getting there

The cave is about 4.5 km from Benaoján and about 11 km from Ronda, whose station is on the line between Algeciras and Bobadilla. Gibraltar Airport (GIB) is the closest in a straight line, about 60 km away across the border; Málaga–Costa del Sol Airport (AGP), about 69 km away, is the usual gateway, with the onward journey by road through the mountains.