For more than 60 years, visitors walked through a cave in Spain; now 280 motifs identified

Not all art is exhibited or put on display. Some of it remains hidden in plain sight, etched into rock and can go unnoticed for centuries, even when people have been walking past them for decades.

In a cave in Spain, hundreds of such engravings has now opened up new avenues of research, offering archaeologists a fresh understanding of the prehistoric artistic traditions of the Iberian Peninsula.A research conducted by Josep Maria Vergès Bosch and Míriam Salas-Altès of the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES-CERCA), was published in Antiquity on 5 November 2026. This report notes the cave to now be the 3rd largest known Palaeolithic cave art assemblage along the Mediterranean side of the Iberian Peninsula.The discovery has brought close attention to the Cova de la Font Major in Catalonia, northeastern Spain, where archaeologists have identified 280 Palaeolithic motifs, including motifs of animals and several non-figurative designs.

Interestingly, people were aware of this cave before, and it was open to visitors as well.