Roca dels Moros (El Cogul)
Declared UNESCO World Heritage, Roca dels Moros is considered one of the most important and well-known cave art sites on the Iberian Peninsula.
This site rests nestled in a cave that humans used for approximately 5,000 years. They left, as testimony to this use, numerous carvings and paintings that can still be seen today, the most prominent of which is a scene commonly interpreted as representing a phallic or fertility dance.
The art sequence’s backdrop is a zone that humans have inhabited in an almost continual manner since the Palaeolithic Era. Excavations performed on the site confirm that the cavity was used exclusively as a place of worship.
This picture sequence comprises some 42 painted morphs and 260 elements carved into the rock. The first groups to make use of the Roca dels Moros were the last hunter-gatherers (8000-5000 BC), whose paintings would later be classified as Levantine art. Millennia later, between 5000 and 1000 BC, Neolithic groups depicted their beliefs through rock drawings, creating diverse representations later classified as schematic art. In addition to the aforementioned paintings, we find posterior Iberian and Roman inscriptions, many of which are illegible.
The Roca dels Moros sequence is managed by the Museu d’Arqueologia de Catalunya. An interpretive centre will be readied in 2010, its building completely integrated into the landscape, where visitors will receive guidelines on how to fully understand the paintings and their historical context. Once construction is complete, the paintings will receive a definitive cleaning.
The Roca dels Moros forms part of the Route of Rock Art (MAC), and of the REPPARP.
