″Unique″ rock figure in Portugal discovered in Marvão
A figure alluding to a parturient woman and “recognized in March 2000, in the municipality of 2000, revealed this Tuesday the archaeologist Jorge de Oliveira.
According to the also professor at the University of Évora (UÉ), the figure is on top of a quartzite outcrop, in a panel located in the Abrigo do Ninho do Bufo, in the heart of the Serra de São Mamede Natural Park, close to the border with Spain.
For Jorge de Oliveira, it is the “first express painting” of a birth hitherto “identified and contextualized” in Portugal.
The archaeologist and professor at the UÉ00 explains that the image is found in a natural site at the summer solstice, even at the end of the day having only been discovered in 200. do it soon, because we don’t have support for our generosity, the salaries that pay for this investigation”, he lamented.
Jorge de Oliveira explained that the image is made up of a “female figure with open legs, from which a child comes out with his head down and fallen”. The archaeologist also added that the space where he found the painting must have been a place of “devotion or of parturients”, there was a figure “touched” by the hands of those who frequented that place.
Jorge de Oliveira also discovered that in recent times several paintings by Marvão have been identified as from the Spanish side of Valencia de Alcántara.
According to the archaeologist and professor from the Spanish area of the same mountain also identified in Portuguese territory, the commander of the Valencia de Alcántara Fire Brigade, Juan Carlos Jiménez, also carried out works of pro-Spanish area of the same mountain, also identified several figures.
“We have already identified more than 50 sites with cave paintings”, he said.
References to rock art in the first area of the São Mamede mountain range date back to the early 20th century.