Dolmen of Guadalperal — dolmen
Pleonr · CC BY-SA 4.0

Dolmen of Guadalperal

Dolmen de Guadalperal

  • 2 min read
  • 39.836° N 5.404° W

Interesting facts

  • The outer ring of quartzite boulders is not original: it is spoil left by Hugo Obermaier when he emptied the earth mound that once covered the tomb.
  • Originally the whole chamber was buried under a mound of earth and gravel, so its open, Stonehenge-like look is largely a result of excavation.
  • Spanish researchers place its construction between the late fifth and the third millennium BC, possibly around 4000 BC.
  • Obermaier was chaplain to the ducal House of Alba, and his excavation records ended up split between the University of Fribourg and the Alba estate.
  • The German couple Georg and Vera Leisner gathered those scattered records in the 1950s and published the monument in 1960, after it was already under water.
  • A coin, pottery fragments and a grinding stone show that people returned to the tomb in Roman times, thousands of years after it was built.
  • Nearby lay traces of a settlement with hearths, millstones and stones for sharpening axes, possibly older than the tomb itself.
  • The idea that the snake-like carving on the menhir maps the River Tagus came from a local enthusiast and has no scientific backing.
  • After its full reappearance in 2019, Spain declared the dolmen a Bien de Interés Cultural, its top heritage protection, on 10 May 2022.
  • New archaeological excavations began at the site in 2021, alongside monitoring of damage and a digital survey of the stones.

Why it is worth it

For most of the past sixty years the Dolmen of Guadalperal has been a monument you could not see. The chambered tomb stood on a low rise beside the Tagus in the Campo Arañuelo district of eastern Extremadura until 1963, when the Valdecañas dam was closed and the reservoir rose over it. It surfaced again only when drought pulled the waterline far enough back, most dramatically in the summer of 2019, when the entire ring of stones stood clear for the first time in about half a century, and again in 2022. Its sudden reappearance earned it the nickname "the Spanish Stonehenge", though it is a very different kind of structure.

Guadalperal is a passage grave. Around 150 granite slabs, set upright, enclose an oval chamber about five metres across, reached by a long corridor some 21 metres long and barely a metre and a half wide. With no roof left, it reads from a distance like a ring of standing stones. At the entrance stands a menhir about two metres tall carved with a long, sinuous line and small cup marks; one reading sees in it a snake, another a map of the Tagus itself, the river the tomb once overlooked. The monument is Neolithic, though published estimates of its exact age vary widely.

It was first studied scientifically in the 1920s, when the German archaeologist Hugo Obermaier excavated here between 1925 and 1927 and recorded pottery, stone axes, flint blades, copper tools and later Roman material around the site. Decades under water have taken a toll: the granite has cracked and the engravings are wearing away, and a local heritage association has campaigned for the monument to be rescued before the damage goes further. Seeing it depends entirely on the level of the reservoir, which makes every sighting of the full ring, half-mirrored in the shallows, feel like a small event.

Getting there

The dolmen lies on the shore of the Valdecañas reservoir in the municipality of Peraleda de la Mata; the nearest town is Navalmoral de la Mata, about 13 km away. The closest airport is Salamanca (SLM), roughly 124 km to the north, but it has few flights; Madrid is the practical gateway, about 200 km away by road, and Renfe trains run from Madrid Atocha to Navalmoral de la Mata in a little over two hours. From Navalmoral you will need a car to reach the reservoir shore, and the stones are only exposed when the water is low.

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Extremadura 5The Most Beautiful Places in Spain 150The Most Remarkable Dolmens 5The Greatest Archaeological Wonders in Spain 9The Most Mystical Archaeological Wonders 73The Most Mystical Places 138The Greatest Archaeological Wonders 306

From the encyclopaedia

The Dolmen of Guadalperal, also known as the Treasure of Guadalperal and as the Spanish Stonehenge for its resemblance to the English Stonehenge, is a megalithic monument dating from around 3000 BC. It is located in Peraleda de la Mata, a town in the region of Campo Arañuelo in eastern Extremadura, Spain. The monument is within the Valdecañas reservoir in the Tagus River and is only visible when the water level allows it.

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