Côa Valley present-day landscape

The Côa River is a Portuguese left-bank tributary of the Douro River, one of the major watercourses that cross the NW Iberian Mountains from east to west. Upstream, the river flows within a deeply gorged valley, through granites, and the last 17 km grades to a meandering pattern into metasedimentary rocks. This portion of the Côa river valley and its confluence with Douro preserve one of the largest concentrations of open-air rock art in the world. Of a total of 1200 decorated rocks identified, 580, have Pleistocene motifs.
The rock art was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1998, based in the following criteria:
“The Upper Palaeolithic rock art of the Côa Valley is an outstanding example of the sudden flowering of creative genius at the dawn of human development”
“The Côa Valley rock art throws light on the social economic, and spiritual life of the early ancestors of humankind in a wholly exceptional manner.”