Cueva de las Manos — cave
Mariano · Public domain

Cueva de las Manos

  • 1 min read
  • 47.150° S 70.667° W
  • UNESCO World Heritage

Interesting facts

  • Of the hands that can be identified, 829 are left hands and only 31 right, suggesting most painters held the spray pipe in their right hand.
  • Besides hands, the walls show guanacos being encircled by hunters, along with scenes of hunting with bolas.
  • Rheas, felines and south Andean deer also appear among the paintings, alongside geometric shapes.
  • An eruption of the Hudson volcano around 4700 BC ended the earliest style of painting and led to the area being abandoned for a time.
  • There are more than 2,000 hand images in and around the cave.
  • The cave's entrance is about 15 metres high and wide, and it runs some 20 metres deep, narrowing to under 2 metres high.
  • The site was last inhabited around AD 700, possibly by ancestors of the Tehuelche people.
  • The Salesian priest Alberto Maria de Agostini wrote the first account of the cave in 1941.
  • Archaeologist Carlos Gradin began the main study of the site in 1964, starting a research programme that lasted some 30 years.

Why it is worth it

Most of the hand images at Cueva de las Manos weren't painted with a brush — they're negative stencils, made by pressing a hand flat against the rock and blowing pigment around it through a hollow bone or reed pipe, leaving a silhouette rather than a filled-in shape. Look closely and the sizes vary enough to suggest whole families took part, including hands small enough to have belonged to children, layered onto the same rock faces over an enormous span of time: the oldest stencils are estimated at up to roughly 9,300 years old, with some evidence of use going back even further.

The pigments were entirely local chemistry: iron oxides for the reds and purples, kaolin clay for white, a mineral called natrojarosite for yellow, manganese oxide for black — a full palette pulled straight out of the surrounding Patagonian rock and soil rather than traded in from anywhere else.

What keeps the site feeling like a discovery rather than a monument is how little-visited it still is — roughly 8,000 people a year make it to this narrow canyon along the Río Pinturas, a tiny number for a UNESCO World Heritage Site, mostly because reaching deep Patagonian steppe takes real effort. The isolation that once made this a good place to leave a mark unbothered for millennia is largely the same isolation that keeps it uncrowded now.

Getting there

149 km from Las Heras. Perito Moreno Jalil Hamer Airport (PMQ) is about 72 km away.

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Argentina 27The Most Beautiful UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Argentina 6The Most Beautiful Natural Wonders in Argentina 14The Most Beautiful UNESCO-Listed Caves 14The Most Beautiful UNESCO-Listed Natural Wonders 38The Most Beautiful Caves 86The Most Remarkable UNESCO-Listed Archaeological Sites 114The Greatest UNESCO-Listed Archaeological Wonders 149The Most Remarkable Archaeological Sites 193The Greatest Archaeological Wonders 306The Most Beautiful UNESCO World Heritage Sites 557The Most Beautiful Natural Wonders 580

From the encyclopaedia

Cueva de las Manos is a cave and complex of rock art sites in the province of Santa Cruz, Argentina, 163 km (101 mi) south of the town of Perito Moreno. It is named for the hundreds of paintings of hands stenciled, in multiple collages, on the rock walls. The art was created in several waves between 7,300 BC and AD 700, during the Archaic period of pre-Columbian South America. The age of the paintings was calculated from the remains of bone pipes used for spraying the paint on the wall of the cave to create the artwork, radiocarbon dating of the artwork, and stratigraphic dating.

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