The site

The Cave of Altamira, near Santillana del Mar in Cantabria, Spain, is renowned for prehistoric art: charcoal drawings, polychrome paintings of local animals, and stencilled human hands, the earliest applied in the Upper Palaeolithic around 36,000 years ago. Discovered in 1868, it became the first European cave whose paintings were argued to be prehistoric, igniting a bitter scholarly controversy that ran until 1902. Today this UNESCO World Heritage site is celebrated for the striking quality of its multicolor imagery.

Field notes

civilizations

Palaeolithic

types

Cave painting

built

35,000 BCE

occupied

35,000 BCE — 11,000 BCE

country

Spain

elevation

95 m above sea level