A 24,000-Year-Old Cave Keeps Becoming Somebody's Sacred Space

More than 200 meters underground in a Spanish cave, Romans carved prayers to a mysterious goddess into walls Ice Age people had marked thousands of years earlier.

Cova de les Dones was already known for more than 100 Paleolithic paintings and engravings made over 24,000 years ago. Archaeologists Aitor Ruiz-Redondo and Virginia Barciela then found a hidden chamber that changed how scholars view the site: a Roman sanctuary, first identified by about 15 Latin inscriptions and a first-century coin from Emperor Claudius' reign.

A 2026 excavation campaign has since redrawn the picture entirely. The known count of Latin inscriptions at the site has jumped from roughly 15 to more than 120, some carved into walls and ceilings well over 200 meters below the surface. The dense clustering and depth of the inscriptions suggest a deliberately designed worship space rather than a spot visited only occasionally.

Five votive inscriptions address a goddess called Domina, meaning the Lady. Three also carry the word MALACI, an unresolved title possibly tied to water, a feature of the underground setting.

Preliminary results suggest the sanctuary drew mostly women. Female names appear among the inscriptions, and numerous spindle whorls, tools linked to women in antiquity, were likely left as offerings. The cave's name, Cova de les Dones, translates from Catalan as Cave of the Women, a name that predates any of these findings. Whether that name preserves any memory of what happened inside it, nobody can say.

Nobody can say whether the Romans knew about the older paintings, or whether two groups separated by thousands of years simply found reasons to leave marks in the same darkness.

Humans kept returning to this hole in the ground, millennia apart, with no explanation left behind. The cave kept no record of what it thought about any of this.

Read the full story at Archaeology Magazine, August 21, 2026

Hot Take: If Indiana Jones taught us anything, 120 inscriptions to an unidentified goddess 200 meters underground are where you stop reading aloud.