The beautiful summer of Spanish prehistorians, between an Andalusian Carnac and a Stonehenge emerging from the waters
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ARCHEOLOGY – More than 500 megaliths have been counted in the south of Spain on a site surveyed since 2018 while, further north, the drought has reappeared a submerged dolmen.
The Spanish reservoir of Valdecanas, in the province of Cáceres, usually bathes at the foot of the ancient remains of the city of Augustobriga. The drought helping, the reduced waters of the lake have made an infidelity to Roman antiquity and unveiled this summer a much older place, bristling with polished stelae rather than carved columns. Its name: Guadalperal.
Its megaliths, erected in Neolithicat least 4,000 years ago, have emerged only four times from the depths of Valdecanas since the reservoir was created in 1963. Nicknamed the “Stonehenge Spanish”, this set of more than 150 orthostat stones, that is to say standing stones, once formed a dolmen covered with a motte. The collective burial would have housed entire generations. It was discovered in 1926 before being submerged, some forty years later, in favor of the development of agricultural land in the region.
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The wave of drought that is hitting the European continent this year however, began the Spanish reservoir, whose water level fell, in mid-August, to 28% of its capacity. While local farmers are showing their concern about the situation, the tourism sector is taking advantage of this rare opportunity to take visitors as close as possible to the standing stones of Valdecanas. “The emergence of dolmens resurrects tourism”rejoiced the owner of a small boat with our colleagues from Reuters.
The site had already come out of the waters in 2019, during a very arid summer. The appearance of the site of Guadalperal is nonetheless rare and has delighted the Spanish specialists in megaliths. “It’s a surprise, we only rarely have the opportunity to have access to it”, archaeologist and prehistorian Enrique Cedillo, from the Complutense University of Madrid, told the British press agency. The archaeological site was classified in May as a Property of Cultural Interest by the Spanish authorities.
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Iberian megaliths
The season will have been rich in megalithic discoveries. Another group whets the scientific appetite of Spanish prehistorian circles. In La Torre-La Janera between the Andalusian municipalities of Ayamonte and Villablanca (province of Huevla), 526 standing stones spread over an area of approximately 600 hectares have been counted since 2018 by researchers from the University of Huelva. Increasingly promising, this space full of strings of megaliths would be one of the largest in Europe.
“This is the most important concentration with the greatest diversity of menhirs gathered in a single site in the Iberian Peninsula“, indicated to Agence France Presse the archaeologist José Antonio Linares. The prehistorian co-signed a study published in the latest issue of the scientific journal Trabajos of Prehistoria which lists the latest discoveries made by researchers at La Torre-La Janera. This site, which went unnoticed for millennia, is made up of menhirs, dolmens, tumulus, cistus and three megalithic enclosures from different periods, lists José Antonio Linares in a press release from the University of Huelva.
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If they do not outnumber the more than 3000 menhirs of Carnacin Morbihan, the megaliths of La Torre-La Janera form a more variegated ensemble, built between the middle of the Ve and the beginning of IIe millennium BC. Primitiva Bueno Ramirez, prehistorian at the Spanish University of Alcala and co-signer of the study published by Trabajos of Prehistoriatold AFP “the excellent preservation” of these remains. “That there are alignments and cromlechs on one and the same site is not so common”, she added.
The submerged dolmen of Guadalperal and the prodigious complex of La Torre-La Janera, however, share the same sword of Damocles. If it is not watched by the inevitable return of the waters, the Andalusian site was discovered during a prospecting campaign carried out before the development, by the owner of the land, of a field devoted to the avocado culture. Researchers have until 2026 to thoroughly study La Torre-La Janera and its fascinating structures. Beyond that, at least 92 hectares of the sector will be transformed into an agricultural plot, where the avocado tree will grow in the shade of ancient remains.
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