Despite centuries of spelunkers and hikers exploring Spain’s labyrinth of caverns, one cave kept a secret until quite recently—a secret written in clay, engravings, and the imprint of vanished beasts.
In 2021, an archaeology team entering Cova Dones (also called Cova de les Dones) near Valencia stumbled upon more than mere geological formations—they found a prehistoric gallery of art, hidden in plain sight, now regarded as one of the most significant discoveries of Paleolithic art in eastern Iberia.
What makes this discovery extraordinary are not just the numbers of motifs or the antiquity of the work, but the unusual techniques, the range of symbols, and the suggestion that this cave served as a symbolic or ritual space for its ancient creators.
As new investigations continue to peel back layers of meaning, one thing is clear: Cova Dones is redefining our view of Paleolithic expression—and beckoning us to listen closely.
Uncovering A Hidden Gallery
For decades, locals and cave enthusiasts knew of the Cova Dones cave system—a 500-metre gallery opening into a steep canyon near the village of Millares, Valencia. But no one had recognized that its walls concealed a vast, ancient archive of human creativity.
It was in June 2021 that the research team, involving the Universities of Zaragoza, Alicante (Spain) and the University of Southampton (UK), made their first find: a painting of an extinct wild bull (an auroch) on a wall deep inside the cave.
That initial discovery led them to launch a systematic survey in 2023, which revealed over 100 graphic units—a trove of paintings, engravings, symbolic signs, and finger tracings—some located nearly 400 metres from the cave entrance.
Among these they documented at least 19 different animals: horses, hinds (female deer), aurochs, a stag, and two indeterminate creatures. Beyond fauna, the walls hold abstract signs (meanders, rectangles), “macaroni” flutings (soft troughs dragged by fingers or tools), and isolated lines—some parts of the cave had been mapped but untouched until now.
What surprised many archaeologists was the dominant medium: instead of the familiar ochre or manganese pigments used elsewhere in Europe, the artists at Cova Dones applied red clay with fingers and palms. The humid conditions inside the cave allowed the clay to dry slowly and adhere to the walls; in places, calcite layers later formed over the clay, preserving it for millennia.
Because such clay-based paleolithic paintings are rare—and relatively delicate—the discovery demands a fresh look at how prehistoric people in Iberia expressed themselves and how many sites might have gone unnoticed because their pigments were ephemeral or obscured.
Deeper Structures And New Revelations
While the cave art steals the headlines, recent expeditions have unveiled another remarkable facet: the presence of over 100 prehistoric structures, called speleofacts, within the cave interior.
Speleofacts are modifications of stalagmites or naturally occurring rock features, deliberately fractured, displaced, and sometimes reassembled—suggesting intentional use or symbolic shaping of space.
According to the archaeologists leading the dig, these structures could hint at ritual activity, path delineation, or even environmental adaptation by prehistoric cave dwellers.
This finding shows the adaptation of the environment by prehistoric communities and places the site as the second most important in the world in this category, only behind the French cave of Saint-Marcel.
Dating the speleofacts is challenging, but researchers point to calcite regrowth on fractured surfaces as evidence that many of these modifications were indeed prehistoric in origin, coexisting with or following the era of the cave paintings.
The relationship between the art panels and the speleofacts is still being untangled: whether the same people who painted used the cave structures, or whether later groups repurposed the cave, remains under investigation.
In a similar vein of discovery, the cave also yielded Roman artifacts in deeper chambers—inscriptions and a coin of Emperor Claudius—which suggest that centuries after the Paleolithic artists left their mark, Roman visitors reached far into the underground recesses. This layering of human presence, across thousands of years, underscores just how long this cave has been woven into human stories.
Significance, Challenges, And Hope
This cave is arguably the most important Palaeolithic art site on the eastern Mediterranean coast of Iberia, thanks to the sheer number, variety, and technical richness of the motifs. In fact, it may now be the European cave with the greatest number of motives discovered since the Atxurra cave in northern Spain in 2015.
But Cova Dones is more than a catalog of ancient drawings—it challenges assumptions. Because Eastern Iberia has historically produced few known Palaeolithic art caves (compared to the Franco-Cantabrian region), this find opens the possibility that other caves with faint or clay-based art remain undetected.
The clay technique is especially important: it is seldom preserved, and many caves may have lost such art over millennia due to erosion or poor visibility. Archaeologists now expect that the findings at Cova Dones will prompt renewed attention to pigment types beyond ochre, especially in caves previously deemed “empty.”
Still, challenges loom. The cave is partly flooded, humid, and fragile. Documenting the art without disturbing its environment demands advanced technologies: 3D LiDAR scanning, photogrammetry, and careful conservation protocols. The research is ongoing, and the team acknowledges that many walls and chambers remain unexplored.
Yet there is reason for hope and excitement. Each new motif, each structural trace offers a whisper of lives long passed: the hands that pressed clay against stone, the people who enacted rituals in half-lit galleries, the centuries that layered human presence within.
The discoveries affirm that the Paleolithic imagination was rich, inventive, and attuned to spatial symbolism—not just survival.
