Learn more about the archeology of the Douro

The Douro locks up millenarian, counted histories through recorded images in rocks, that survive since the Beginnings of the Humanity. In the edges of the river Côa, one of the tributaries of the Douro, rises the greater and more important world-wide set of paleolithic art to the outdoors, that constitutes an only inheritance of our more remote ancestor.

Next to the riverbed Côa vestiges are risen that retrace to the Beginnings of the Humanity, when anatomically similar ancestor to the man, the Homo sapiens sapiens, or Man of Cro-Magnon, inhabited the region. This being existed in the Land during the Age of the Ice, when the climate was more cold and dry, being that the North of the current Europe if found covered by an extensive trick glacier. This Age corresponds to the Paleolithic period (Age of the Old Rock), that it is divided in four periods: Aurignacense (of the 40 a thousand 27 a thousand years of the gift), Gravettense (of the 27 a thousand 21 a thousand years of the gift), Solutrense (of the 21 a thousand 18 a thousand years of the gift), Magdalenense (of the 18 a thousand 10 a thousand years of the gift).

The first vestiges of rupestre art of the Paleolithic period, to the outdoors, had been discovered in 1981, in Portugal, in county of Freixo de Espada to the Brace. In the engravings of Mazouco some figures are represented, identifying themselves easily the image of a horse.

The project of construction of a barrage next to the estuary of the Côa made possible the discovery of some engravings in the zone of Canada of the Hell, in 1992, what it resulted in the ceasing of the works of construction of the bayou, that would go to submerge the area in cause. Between 1994 and 1995 other recorded rocks as of the Ribeira de Piscos had been discovered (Muxagata), Penascosa (Better Castle) and Fifth of the Bark (Chãs). In this last year the Archaeological Park of the Valley of the Côa was created.The found rupestres engravings in the Valley of the Côa are placed in the periods Gravettense (archaeological small farm Cardina I), Solustrense (archaeological small farms Penascosa and Canada of the Hell), and Magdalenense (archaeological small farm Fifth of the Bark). The horse, auroque (ancestral savage of the current domestic oxen), and the goat mounts, in the height a common animal in the region due to the cold and dry climate that remained there, are the reasons most common in the engravings of the Côa. These figures had been recorded for incision or peening, being reduced the number of the spotted images the red.