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| Prehistoric
rock art |
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| Mountains
of north-eastern |
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| Prehistoric
rock artof |
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Through
the imposing mountains of the north-eastern region
of Portugal, where in spring the almond trees are
in full blossom and in autumn the vines are covered
with fiery red leaves, there runs into the River
Douro from the south a tributary whose name is now
universally known. This is the River Côa,
whose vast valley contains many examples of a long
flourishing artistic cycle. Millennium after millennium,
the rock formations that line the river banks have
been converted into panels covered with thousands
of engravings bequeathed to us by our ancestors'
creative impulses.
dating back to the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic
Age, these open air ''panels'' bear witness to an
artistic vitality and mastery that have brought
us into touch with 25,000 years past time. This
extensive art gallery provides us with a record
of the Neolithic period and the Iron Age, and then
transports us in one fell swoop across two thousand
years of history to settle in the Modern Era with
its religious representations, names, dates and
even, only a few decades ago, some figures drawn
by the children of a local miller. Almost
all the motifs are engraved in the rock, presenting
us with themes, techniques and conventions common
to those other contemporary works in Western Europe
which were discovered in the nineteenth century
hidden in the French-Basque caves and by the turn
of the century were already referred to as great
art. It was, however, not until the end of the twentieth
century that we were suddenly to see such art burst
forth from the hidden recesses of the caves into
the open air, where the daily and seasonal interplay
of light and shade, brought to us by both the sunlight
and the full moon, simultaneously exposes an hides
it in a fantastic game of revelation and concealment.
For the last seventeen kilometres of the river's
course, as it wends its way from south to north,
these engraved panels are spread over a large area,
reaching as far as the point where it flows into
the river Douro and penetrating into the valleys
of other tributary streams. The very size of this
area was sufficient to dictate the creation of Portugal's
first archaeological park, which since December
2, 1998 has been included in the list of monuments
classified by UNESCO World Heritage. Such classification
was the result of a sudden and radical change in
government policy, beginning in October 1995 with
the decision to suspend the already well advanced
project for the building of dam designed to promote
the first phase of hydroelectric development in
the River Côa. The subsequent simultaneous
creation of the Côa Valley Archaeological
Park and the National Rock Art Centre, both of which
are based in Vila Nova de Foz Côa, represented
the culmination of an important decision that will
clearly have a crucial effect on the status of rock
art, archaeology and heritage in Portugal at various
levels. The
themes of the engravings are basically zoomorphic,
with drawings of mountain goats, horses, aurochs
(wild hulls) and deer. The first three of these
species are the most common and characteristic of
the earliest phases of artistic production, all
of them corresponding to the large herbivores that
were typical of the ecosystems of the Upper Paleolithic
Age in the region. There
are also some rare engravings of fish and just one
single instance of a human form, the latter occurring
at the end the Upper Paleolithic Age. As was typical
of Quaternary art, signs were engraved under the
form of straight lines or in zigzags, with the rocks
being pecked or scratched with instruments made
of quartzite or flint. The engravings were made
through the use of several different techniques,
sometimes occurring in combination: fine line incision
(resulting in motifs that are more difficult to
read because of the delicacy of the marking), pecking
(a succession of points hammered into the stone),
abrasion and scratching of the surface. The latter
technique was less common but has resulted in those
panels that have the greatest visual impact. In
the centre of engravings that is situated furthest
upstream, at Faia, where the river flows between
granite escarpments, some remains have been identified
of red paintings, either covering over lines previously
produced by pecking or completing engraved motifs.
This fact indicates the contemporary use of the
two techniques: engraving and painting.
The Iron Age, the second moment that as to decisively
mark the development of this long artistic cycle,
has left us with many magnificent panels of fine
line engravings of figures, with an obvious fondness
being shown for warriors with long legs and tiny
heads, armed with swords and lances and riding stylised
horses with long, thin bodies and high necks. The
cycle of rock art began again in be seventeenth
century with the engraving of religious and profane
motifs. These were now accompanied by inscriptions
and dates and continued until the mid twentieth
century with various engravings depicting the terrestrial,
marine and winged ''creatures'' that are most typical
of our contemporary age: fish and birds, boats,
trains and planes. All of this magnificent group
of open air engravings, which finally lays to rest
the old myth of rock art being forever enclosed
in caves, is contained within the Côa Valley
archaeological Park, which is itself divided to
three separate centres. Visits are conducted by
specialist guides, but must be booked in advance.
The three centres are: Canada do Inferno, which
was the first group of engravings to be discovered,
very close to Vila Nova de Foz Côa, Ribeira
de Piscos, at Muxagata, and Penascosa, close to
the village of Castelo Melhor. Situated
in the very heart of the archaeological park, the
Quinta da Ervamoira provides a complementary service
for visitors to the engravings. Here there is a
museum that gives a full description of the region
and its ancestral customs, without forgetting the
extremely ancient bread making cycle and the traditional
features of Douro wine production, surely yet another
of this region's most undeniable riches.
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