The Cueva Pintada and the ancient Canarians
Say "cave painting" and most of us picture animals: a hunting scene, a running herd, a handprint on the rock.
In Gáldar, in the north of Gran Canaria, there is a painted room whose walls are lined with geometric patterns: squares, rectangles, triangles and circles, in red, white and black, set side by side in a regular order. At first glance you see decoration. Maybe it isn't.
This is the Cueva Pintada, the "painted cave", today the heart of the Museo y Parque Arqueológico Cueva Pintada in the town centre of Gáldar, 27 kilometres from Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. If you want to go, a few things are worth knowing in advance. The museum asks you to buy your ticket online, because it no longer takes cash on site, and to protect the paintings only a limited number of visitors can go in at a time. Opening hours change with the season, so check them, together with ticket prices and free days, on the museum's official website. You can explore on your own, not only on a guided tour. And you can't take photos inside the painted chamber itself; in the rest of the museum you can, without flash.
A room we can't read
Try looking at the wall differently. Not as a picture, but as a text.
According to the museum, the rhythm and symmetry of the panel, and the fact that it belongs to a ritual space, suggest that you are looking at true ideograms: signs that mean something. The patterns are not random. The composition is symmetrical around the central axis of the room, which means it was planned in advance.
So here is a room where we know how big it is, what it is made of, how it was painted and roughly when. The only thing we don't know is what it says.
The painted chamber up close
The chamber is rectangular in plan, and the decoration runs along the upper half of three of its walls. José Barrios García, a researcher at the University of La Laguna, worked with a reconstruction in his doctoral thesis: according to it, the left wall is 4.5 metres long, the back wall 5.0 and the right wall 4.3, and the room is 3.2 metres high at the back.
We also know how the painting was done. First the cracks between the layers of tuff were filled with mortar, then the surface was smoothed with a layer of clay. For red they used almagre, an oxidised, reddish clay, and for white a fine, whitish clay. The paint was applied with fingers or a brush, probably made of goat hair or rushes.
The black comes with a twist. It isn't paint. According to the museum, the black fields are the natural darkening of the tuff, the rock itself. So part of the pattern is not a painted surface at all, but the bare rock.
According to the museum, this is the most complex example of indigenous mural painting on Gran Canaria.
Who painted it: the ancient Canarians and Agáldar
The room is the work of the ancient Canarians. The word is precise here: according to El Museo Canario, the first inhabitants of Gran Canaria are called Canarians (also indigenous people, aborigines or ancient Canarians), while the name Guanches belongs to the native people of Tenerife. How they differed and where they came from is something we unpack in our article on the Guanches.
According to the Cabildo de Gran Canaria, today's Gáldar is directly linked to pre-Hispanic Agáldar, which two native rulers, Andamana and Gumidafe, made the island's capital when they set up their court there. After them came the guanartemes, the rulers of Agáldar, one after another, down to Tenesor Semidán. He lived through the conquest, later took the name Fernando Guanarteme, and secured the signing of the Carta de Calatayud, which recognised the freedom of the Canarians.
According to the museum's guide, the Agáldar of the 14th and 15th centuries occupied what is now the historic centre. Barrios García places the guanarteme's residence a few hundred metres from the cave, where the church of Santiago de los Caballeros stands today. According to the 2007 guide, the museum's exhibition is narrated from start to finish by a woman: Arminda, daughter of Guanarteme el Bueno, who was baptised after the conquest, married Hernando de Guzmán and became Catalina de Guzmán. We wrote about Tenerife's legendary princess here: Dácil, the Guanche princess.
The village that emerged around the chamber
For a long time the painted chamber looked like a lone cave. Excavation began in 1987, and according to the museum there have been fifteen excavation seasons since then, covering more than 6,000 square metres.
Today the chamber is surrounded by the remains of an entire village, with around sixty archaeological structures in the park. The houses climb in terraces from the bottom of the ravine up to the town centre, and this village was one of the neighbourhoods of Agáldar. According to the museum's description, they are square in plan with a circular outer wall, and inside they have one or two side alcoves that open to the south through a small passage. The roofs rested on wooden beams covered with stone slabs, earth and mud. Around the hearths, seeds, animal bones, fish remains, lapas and burgados (the limpets and sea snails that live on the rocks) have survived.
Objects brought from the Iberian Peninsula have also turned up (wheel-thrown pottery, coins, swords, horseshoes), along with traces of the 16th-century sugar industry. Among the finds are pintaderas: fired clay objects with a stem whose flat, geometric end is decorated with circles, triangles, zigzag lines and stacked angles. The same geometric shapes as on the chamber wall.
How old it is
The Cueva Pintada is the most frequently dated archaeological site on Gran Canaria: a 2014 study by its excavators counted 45 radiocarbon dates. The same authors warn that a single date of this kind is worth little on its own ("one date is no date").
The museum's website distinguishes two periods of occupation: the first from the 6th to the 11th century, the second from the 13th to the 16th, lasting until after the conquest. The excavators' 2014 study is more cautious about the start: in their view, the oldest village began to be built around the 7th century. So the two sources disagree by a century, and we are not going to settle it for them.
In 2013 the Cabildo published the results of samples taken from inside the chamber. The two oldest, of pine wood, gave the range 601 to 994; the most reliable, charcoal from a tree of the laurel family, gave 1049 to 1257. According to the museum, the cave complex took its present form after the 12th century, and the painted panel may have been made then. An important distinction: these dates measure the shaping and use of the chamber, not the paint. According to the excavators, this lets them approach the age of the paintings reliably for the first time, but only indirectly.
What we don't know
First and most important: we don't know what the signs mean. The press kit for the museum's opening in 2006 states plainly that the meaning of the triangles, circles, squares and stacked angles is "for the moment, unknown".
There is one reading that comes up often: that the wall is a calendar. The museum's website mentions it as the view of "some researchers", as a lunar and solar calendar based on series of the number 12 and on the alternation of red, white and unpainted fields. Its author is Barrios García, who reads a 3 x 4 grid as the twelve months of the lunar year. He himself writes that he offers only one possible reading, and that since nothing similar has been found on the island, it is too early to draw definitive conclusions. One of his sub-hypotheses he presents explicitly with caution, because it rests on a 1974 drawing (the work of Beltrán and Alzola), and J. Onrubia, one of the authors of the museum's guide, doubted its accuracy. So this is one researcher's careful proposal, not the decipherment of the wall.
Of the right-hand panel we can't even say that much. It is in such poor condition, and so few reliable old descriptions of it survive, that Barrios García had to leave it out of his study.
According to the museum, the cave was both a dwelling and a burial place, very probably linked to a noble native lineage. What rituals took place here (food offerings to the dead, funeral feasts) is reported by a single chronicler, Marín de Cubas, and the museum itself stresses this. Nor has it been possible to pin down exactly what the pintaderas were for: according to the guide, they were probably marks of a group or lineage. And because almost nothing on the house floors was found in its original position, it is hard to say what each room was used for.
We don't even know for sure when the cave was found. According to the Cabildo's 2006 press kit, probably in 1862, during earthworks on the prickly pear plantations (used for breeding cochineal insects), but the official discovery is dated to 1873, when José Ramos Orihuela climbed in through a narrow opening in the roof and saw the paintings. Even two of the Cabildo's own pages contradict each other: the page that collects the datings says it is a mistake to treat 1873 as the year of the actual find, while the page on historical heritage still gives 1873. The safest way to put it: it came to light around 1862 and was rediscovered in 1873.
A chronic patient behind glass
What survives of the paintings did not survive by itself. The cave got its first entrance in 1884, and the traveller Olivia Stone was already urging at the time that the town council buy it, clean it out and open it to visitors. In 1887 the French anthropologist René Verneau described the coloured panels in meticulous detail. Meanwhile the cave suffered everything: a destroyed ceiling, cavities filled in for gardens, and at one point it even served as a pigsty and a dung store.
The turning point came at the end of 1969 with a campaign by students from Gáldar at the University of La Laguna. In 1970, during work against the damp, a whole group of caves around the chamber emerged from under the rubble, but through lack of knowledge and lack of foresight a large part of the complex was destroyed. Only a few objects were saved, thanks to some neighbours. On 29 April 1972 the site opened, and on 5 May it was declared a national historic and artistic monument, today a Bien de Interés Cultural. Ten years later, in 1982, it was closed: irrigation of the surrounding fields, poor sealing and unplanned visits made the chamber far too humid and pushed up the temperature.
After twenty years of work, the present museum opened on 26 July 2006. Over the site went a roof of 5,700 square metres weighing 68 tonnes, which from the outside recalls the greenhouses of the banana plantations on the Gáldar plain. In front of the chamber a glass-walled "bubble" was built, with two separate climates: the cave's and the visitors'. According to the museum's director, the idea was to put the visitor in the display case and let the past look at them, not the other way round. She also called the cave a chronic patient that needs constant attention, but with care can hold out for a long time yet. The museum still monitors its microclimate continuously, because dust from the town centre, traffic and vibration keep putting it under strain.
The conquest, the Guerra de Canaria, took place between 1478 and 1483. According to the museum's guide, close to 20,000 people lived in the island's villages, and after Castilian colonisation, deportation and slavery, little more than 3,000 remained. We don't know when or how the meaning of the signs on the wall was lost. What we do know is that only a small fraction of the people the painters belonged to survived the conquest, and that the wall they left behind is waiting today, on the other side of a glass wall, for someone to read it again.
If you had to leave a message on a wall for a thousand years, in signs that nobody after you would be able to read, what would you paint?
How to visit
Where it is: in the historic centre of Gáldar, 27 kilometres from Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 50 kilometres from the airport and less than 9 kilometres from Puerto de las Nieves in Agaete. Our listing: Museo y Parque Arqueológico Cueva Pintada.
Tickets and opening hours: online, starting from the museum's official website, no cash.
How: the visit can be self-guided, guided or assisted, which means staff help you at several points along the route. On Sundays there are only self-guided or assisted visits. The museum recommends allowing at least seventy minutes.
Accessibility: the route runs along walkways, with lifts and wide doors. For visitors with visual impairments there is audio description and a tactile visit with replicas of the objects.
By bus: you'll find the routes on the museum's "Cómo llegar" page.
In the centre of Gáldar you can walk to the Casa-Museo Antonio Padrón and the La Recova market, and the Mirador de los Pinos de Gáldar is in the town too. On the trail of the ancient Canarians: in neighbouring Santa María de Guía, the granary caves of the Cenobio de Valerón; in Agaete, the necropolis of El Maipés; in Las Palmas, El Museo Canario; in Telde, Cuatro Puertas; between Agüimes and Ingenio, the Guayadeque ravine; and the cave houses of Artenara. We've gathered the rest of the island's sights here: What to see in Gran Canaria.
Sources: Museo y Parque Arqueológico Cueva Pintada (Cabildo de Gran Canaria): official website (history, conservation, visiting, getting there), the 2006 opening press kit and the 2007 visitor guide; study by C. G. Rodríguez Santana, J. I. Sáenz Sagasti and J. Onrubia Pintado (Boletín electrónico de Patrimonio Histórico, Cabildo de Gran Canaria, 2014); Cabildo de Gran Canaria, "Gran Canaria: un viaje en el tiempo" dating database and the Patrimonio Histórico page; José Barrios García's doctoral thesis (University of La Laguna); El Museo Canario; ULPGC library (2013); La Aventura de la Historia.
Cover photo (cropped): the excavated village in the Cueva Pintada archaeological park, Gáldar. Thebrainchamber1, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.