Ginés Donaire I Jaén, (EFE).- UNESCO declared in 1998 the Levantine rock art of the Spanish Mediterranean Arc as a World Heritage Site and a good part of these rock paintings are located in the Sierra Morena of Jaén and, more specifically, in the municipality of Aldeaquemada, where there are different groups of cave paintings, schematic and Levantine style, spread over cliffs and rock shelters in the municipal area.
“It is a patrimony of our ancestors, a way of expression and communication and, ultimately, I believe that those ancient settlers were storytellers,” Ángel Alcaide, an expert in rock art and entrepreneur of La Cimbarra Ecoturismo, told EFE.
A heritage, Alcaide points out, that “has come to recognize and highlight the enormous importance of the cultural manifestations of the ancient inhabitants of these lands.”
Well, this legacy is emerging in recent times as an important tourist product in the province of Jaén, mainly in the municipalities of Aldeaquemada and Santa Elena.
Early 20th century map
“Here we have both Levantine and schematic cave paintings, with an abundance of anthropomorphic symbols,” explains Ángel Alcaide from the Prado de Azogue paintings, where he guides a group of tourists.
Although the UNESCO declaration did not arrive until 1998, at the beginning of the 20th century, around 1912, the French priest Henri Breuil made the first descriptive map of the main rock groups of Sierra Morena.
In 1917, the Teruel researcher Juan Cabré Aguiló carried out another interesting field work on the cave paintings of the Aldeaquemada region.
In this area, rock art, “art on rock”, is made up of the pictorial manifestations that remote ancestors left on the walls of numerous covachas and rock shelters in these mountains.
Said more or less realistic manifestations, but generally schematic, reproduce human beings, animals and symbols, forming isolated scenes. The representations not only evoke and relate part of daily life, but also leave us testimony of its complex and mysterious spirituality. EFE