Ancient Iberia

And so it begins. I’ve just brewed a strong cup of coffee, and a sleeping kitten purrs away happily in my lap.

It feels significant to be beginning this new series on the Solstice. Though many of us are familiar with the great ancient sites that marked the turning of the year in places like Stonehenge and Newgrange in Britain, it’s less widely known that the Iberian Peninsula also has thousands of ancient monuments, many of which appear to have been aligned with celestial events and seasonal cycles, like the Solstice.

And it wasn’t just the Neolithic monoliths that followed the movements of the heavens. Archaeologists have suggested even certain Palaeolithic burials were located in caves with solar orientations. We will explore these in the coming weeks when we travel due north, to one of the most densely-populated cave art regions in the world.

The Iberian Peninsula contains one of Europe’s richest prehistoric landscapes. Long before the arrival of Rome, the peninsula was already marked by the sacred. It contains some of the oldest and most extensive rock art traditions in the world, with painted caves stretching from Cantabria and Asturias in the north, to Extremadura in central Spain, and Andalusia to the south. Deep beneath the earth, generation upon generation left images of bison, horses, deer, handprints, geometric signs, and mysterious symbols whose meanings remain elusive.

These images were not created in isolation. They formed part of wider ritual landscapes in which caves, mountains, rivers, and prominent natural features appear to have carried symbolic and spiritual significance. Whether understood as sanctuaries, places of initiation, portals to other worlds, or sites of communication with ancestral powers, they suggest that the landscape itself was already being experienced as alive with meaning.

Alongside its conglomeration of ochre scriptures, the Iberian Peninsula contains one of the largest and most diverse concentrations of megalithic landscapes in Europe.