Côa Valley Rock Art

Interesting facts

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.

Some horses and aurochs were given two or three heads on a single body, an early device for suggesting movement much like frames of animation.

The engravings were first noticed in 1991 by the archaeologist Nelson Rebanda during survey work for the planned dam.

Among thousands of animals there is a rare human figure from the Magdalenian period, engraved at Ribeira de Piscos.

Engraving resumed in the Iron Age, when local artists added warriors armed with swords, lances and shields to the valley's rocks.

The tradition never fully ended: in the 20th century local people carved boats, trains, bridges and even aeroplanes onto the same outcrops.

The Côa Museum was designed by the architects Tiago Pimentel and Camilo Rebelo, who won its competition in 2004.

The Spanish site of Siega Verde, added to the listing in 2010, holds 91 engraved panels along about a kilometre of the Águeda River.

In 2018 the Côa and Siega Verde sites joined the Council of Europe's Prehistoric Rock Art Trails cultural route.

Why it is worth it

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.

What makes the Côa art so moving is the way it was made to be seen in daylight, on the open landscape, rather than in the darkness of a cave. Some figures are up to 180 cm long, though most are 40–50 cm. Fine incised lines often accompany the bolder strokes, adding detail of coat and form. Overlapping figures on the same panel show that certain rocks were returned to and reworked over thousands of years. The rock art is spread along the lower 17 km of the river, with more than a thousand decorated outcrops identified in over eighty places.

The site was nearly lost. The engravings came to wider attention in the early 1990s during construction of a hydroelectric dam that would have drowned the valley. A public campaign, with a slogan borrowed from a popular song saying that the engravings cannot swim, turned into a national cause, and in November 1995 the new government of António Guterres halted the project. The valley became an archaeological park, UNESCO inscribed it on the World Heritage List in 1998, and in 2010 the listing was extended to Siega Verde just across the border in Spain. The same year the Côa Museum opened, a building chosen through an architectural competition that presents the art and its context.

Getting there

The park is centred on Vila Nova de Foz Côa, where the Côa Museum stands; the village of Custóias lies about 19 km away. The nearest airfield is Vila Real (VRL), about 57 km away; Porto Airport (OPO) is the main international gateway for northern Portugal. A car is the practical way to reach the valley.

Côa Valley Rock Art

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

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