Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The Palaeolithic Palette
A most mysterious group of 95 huge monoliths forms a strange circle in an isolated clear-
ing among Alentejan olive groves near Évora. It's one of Europe's most impressive prehis-
toric sites: the Cromeleque dos Almendres.
All over Portugal, but especially in the Alentejo, you can visit such ancient funerary and
religious structures, built during the Neolithic and Mesolithic eras. Most impressive are the
dolmens: rectangular, polygonal or round funerary chambers, reached by a corridor of stone
slabs and covered with earth to create an artificial mound. King of these is Europe's largest
dolmen, the Anta Grande do Zambujeiro, near Évora, with six 6m-high stones forming a
huge chamber. Single monoliths, or menhirs, often carved with phallic or religious sym-
bols, also dot the countryside like an army of stone sentinels. Their relationship to promot-
ing fertility seems obvious.
With the arrival of the Celts (800-200 BC) came the first established hilltop settlements,
called
castros
. The best-preserved example is the Citânia de Briteiros in the Minho, where
you can literally step into Portugal's past. Stone dwellings were built on a circular or ellipt-
ical plan, and the complex was surrounded with a dry-stone defensive wall. In the
citânias
(fortified villages) further south, dwellings tended to be rectangular.
A SERENDIPITOUS DISCOVERY
In 1989 researchers were studying the rugged valley of the Rio Côa, 15km from the Spanish frontier, to understand
the environmental impact of a planned hydroelectric dam that was to flood the valley. In the course of their work,
they made an extraordinary discovery: a number of petroglyphs (rock engravings) dating back tens of thousands of
years.
Yet it wasn't until 1992, after dam construction was underway, that the importance of the find began to take root.
Archaeologists came across whole clusters of petroglyphs, mostly dating from the Upper Palaeolithic period
(10,000 to 40,000 years ago). Local people joined the search and the inventory of engravings soon grew into the
thousands. In 1998 the future of the collection was safeguarded when Unesco designated the valley a World Herit-
age site.
Today Rio Côa (
Click here
) holds one of the largest-known collections of open-air Palaeolithic art in the world.
Archaeologists are still puzzling over the meaning of the engravings - and why this site was chosen. Most of the
petroglyphs depict animals: stylised horses, aurochs (extinct ancestors of domesticated cattle) and long-horned ibex
(extinct species of wild goat). Some animals are depicted with multiple heads - as if to indicate the animal in mo-
tion - while others are drawn so finely that they require artificial light to be seen. Later petroglyphs begin to depict
human figures as well. The most intriguing engravings consist of overlapping layers, with successive artists adding
their touches thousands of years after the first strokes were applied. A kind of Palaeolithic palimpsest in which gen-
erations of hunters worked and reworked the engravings of their forebears.
