Mallata Coats
Visitors to the Mallata caves will be able to contemplate a prehistoric treasure, made up of one of the best sets of cave paintings in the Schematic style. The Mallata caves are part of the Río Vero Cultural Park, at the foot of the Pyrenees and in the centre of the province of Huesca, in Aragon.
Rock art
Rock art is classified into three main branches: Palaeolithic, Levantine and schematic. Due to the large number of cave paintings in 60 shelters found in the Río Vero Cultural Park, where paintings dating back several thousand years and examples of each of the different types of this art coexist, this natural space was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1998.
It is also part of the European itinerary "Paths of Prehistoric Cave Art", which offers in Spain up to 86 major archaeological and cave destinations grouped into 12 routes. It is a Cultural Itinerary of the Council of Europe.
In the Mallata caves you can see examples of schematic cave art, which, in time, would be the result of human beings who inhabited these lands between the Neolithic and the Age of Metals. The works reflect that these were people who already knew and practised agriculture and livestock farming.
Schematic cave art is characterised by the presence of human and animal figures with very simple lines, and geometric figures and lines that represent an abstraction which specialists consider to be an aesthetic evolution of the predominantly naturalistic paintings typical of the post-Palaeolithic period. Likewise, some authors indicate, due to the difficulty of their interpretation, that they are symbolic, religious and ritual in nature.
In the Cultural Park of the River Vero there are numerous examples of schematic art, mainly in the Mallata, Barfaluy, Gallinero, Regacens and Upper Lecina shelters.
The Mallata shelter is divided into Mallata I and Mallata B. The shelters are in an impressive limestone cliff located at the convergence of 3 ravines, the Basender, the Choca (both are dry ravines) and the Vero river. Most of the shelters of the Cultural Park of the Vero River are located in the same area.
Mallata I
Some twenty metres long and with a maximum depth of seven metres, the Mallata I shelter has five sectors, where all the figures represented are red.
Among the most outstanding examples of rock art are three scenes in which human beings can be seen carrying deer on a tether. In one of them, a man is carrying a deer on a long rope, in another he is holding it by the snout, and in the third a person with a headdress is between two deer, carrying one on a short rope.
Other animals can also be seen, some resembling a wild boar, another unknown horned animal and various signs that are difficult to interpret: lines, semicircles, lines in the shape of arches and crosses.
Mallata B
Mallata B is an elongated shelter. Its mouth is about 20 metres long and its maximum depth is 5.75 metres. All the figures found in this cave are red, and they tend to cluster in the centre, where it is deepest.
Here you can see human figures together, with a marked distinction of sex in some of them, animals and signs in the form of a comb and another that resembles a tree with its branches.
