Petroglyph Cova da Bruxa

Rock carvings or petroglyphs are symbolic expressions of prehistoric communities, and can be considered one of the most interesting cultural manifestations of Galician prehistory.

The known petroglyphs of our municipality are distributed across most parishes, with a particular concentration in those of Serres and Louro; among them, two are singular within the ensemble of Galician rock art: Cova da Bruxa and Laxe das Rodas.

With the Guide to the Petroglyphs of Muros by Eiroa and Rey (1984), a catalogue was compiled of the known rock art sites at that time. However, it should be noted that in the late 1990s, a series of surveys revealed and catalogued approximately ten new stations, so that today more than thirty petroglyphs are recorded across the municipality.

To date, three rock art stations have been studied: "Cova da Bruxa" (October 2006), "Laxe das Rodas" (September 2007), and "Naraio I" (September 2008), research carried out by the "Group of Studies for the Prehistory of the Northwest (GEPN)", Department of History I, Faculty of History, University of Santiago de Compostela.

The figurative repertoire of the Muros petroglyphs includes both geometric and figurative-naturalistic motifs; geometric representations are, in Muros as in the wider Galician context, the most abundant and widespread.

Regarding naturalistic motifs, in Muros we find representations of animals: deer, a riding scene, and the figure of a canid, as well as a human figure. The human figure and the canid from Cova da Bruxa are unique within Galician rock art, and the deer, although found at only one station, display such a variety of forms that this site is singular in Galicia: the antlers are represented with straight lines rising from the animal's head and branching outward.

The notable scarcity of figurative-naturalistic representations stands in contrast to the notable development of geometric ones. Compositions are infrequent, and it is difficult to determine with sufficient clarity whether certain rocks show a simple accumulation of figures at the same level — from different periods or the same period but unrelated — or whether several of them form an overall composition.

Despite all this, animals tend to be depicted in attitudes characteristic of their natural behaviour, indicating a notable degree of observation of the animal world by the engraver.