more than a hundred prehistoric engravings. This is what the Cova de la Vila contains, an underground cave that speleologists have rediscovered in La Febró, in Tarragona, after losing track of it in the 40s.

“We began to move stones, remove earth and in the end we opened a small passage,” says Francesc Rubinat, who explains how they managed to get from a five-centimeter hole to the oval room of 90 square meters which houses the engravings. “I had, without expecting it, the immense honor and surprise of being the first to enter the room,” says speleologist Juli Serrano.

“We will probably find remains of material culture, probably ceramics and bones of people and animals that we can directly relate to that artistic expression,” explains the researcher Antonio Rodríguez about these engravings, which represent the reality of the peasants of the time.

In turn, the specialist in prehistoric art Ramón Viñas stresses that “this underground set is engraved, not painted” as is the case of other walls in Catalonia. It is, then, a unpublished type of rock art, in which the composition of its figures is stylistically homogeneous. “It is a technique in this case that is done with the fingers, to a large extent,” Viñas details, noting that “flint or fine sticks were also used to do more detailed things.”

Is one of the few representations of underground schematic art in Tarragona and by extension, in Catalonia. More than a hundred engravings that experts associate with the Neolithic funerary world and that, now, will once again go down in history.