Archaeologists investigating a remote and mysterious cave located high up in the rugged limestone cliffs of a canyon about 40 miles southwest of Valencia, Spain, are uncovering an extraordinary archaeological site that is fast emerging as one of the most culturally significant places on the planet.
Known to local people since at least the 18th century as Cova de les Dones, or the Women’s Cave, the cavern features its own subterranean lake that was almost certainly regarded as sacred in ancient times. Research reveals that the site has been intermittently and repeatedly utilized for ritual or religious purposes for a minimum of 24,000 years. This remarkable time depth places it among the longest-used sacred sites in the world, boasting a duration of repeated ritual use more than ten times greater than the oldest traditional churches, synagogues, or Hindu temples.
The cave’s history of human activity stretches back to the Stone Age. Approximately 24,000 years ago, and again around 16,000 years, Upper Palaeolithic people used the cavern to produce ritual cave art. The oldest paintings include 11 horses, five female red deer, four male red deer, four giant wild cattle, one ibex, and two animals of indeterminate type, alongside more than 80 abstract signs comprising rectangles, straight lines, and wavy lines of currently unknown meaning. In front of a painted panel, archaeologists also discovered a pierced stone pendant from the Palaeolithic era, deliberately placed as a votive offering likely meant for an earth, animal, or ancestor spirit.
Even rarer than the paintings are a series of remarkable structures built within the cave from deliberately broken stalactites and stalagmites. These constructions include circles, platforms, paths, and simple stairways, which are likely contemporaneous with the paintings or potentially even more ancient. Following the Palaeolithic era, the cave saw continued use between 7,500 and 3,500 years ago by Neolithic and Bronze Age people for unknown purposes. During parts of the Iron Age, particularly in the 5th to 3rd centuries BC, the discovery of 200 ceramic chalices strongly suggests the cavern served religious functions.
By Roman times, roughly 2,000 years ago, the cave’s usage shifted toward rituals and activities specifically associated with women, potentially aimed at ensuring female reproductive health and success. Current ongoing investigations have identified at least 120 inscriptions from the Roman period. Among the few translated so far, most are addressed by women to a Roman goddess known as Domina, meaning ‘our lady’, or Malaci. In Roman tradition, the honorific title domina was frequently applied to the Bona Dea, a fertility and women’s health deity whose main shrine in Rome was also located in a cave with sacred water and who held the title Feminea Dea, or ‘the women’s goddess’.
Researchers are still examining the exact meaning of Malaci. It could represent the personal name of a local deity, such as ‘the Lady Malaci’, or refer to the original name of the cave in a lost local language. Other possibilities include a connection to the Phoenician term m’lakh, denoting divine messengers or mediating manifestations of a deity, or a link to the Etruscan word mlaka, used to describe sacred vows and votive offerings. An inscription on the cave wall reading ‘domina votum’ demonstrates that visitors made vows and sacred offerings to the goddess, likely to secure help with fertility or health.
Alongside these inscriptions, archaeologists last year recovered probable female-associated votive offerings from a Roman ritual sanctuary inside the cave, including a bracelet, two finger rings, and a number of spindle whorls historically used by women to spin raw fibers into textile yarn. The strong association with women during the Roman period, coupled with similar evidence from the preceding Iron Age, suggests that these traditions persisted through the post-Roman, medieval, and early modern eras. Into the early 20th century, the cave continued to serve as a ritualized setting where local marriages were consummated.
Dr Aitor Ruiz Redondo, co-director of the Cova Dones investigation from the universities of Zaragoza and Southampton, emphasized the unique nature of the site. He noted that while the archaeological remains from the Palaeolithic era, later prehistory, and the Roman period are each highly significant on their own, combined they constitute a remarkable assemblage of global importance that preserves evidence of a unique series of events across millennia.
