![]() ![]() Artificial lakes, which supply water to homes, farms and factories, dropped to 36 percent of capacity on average in early August, well below the 10-year average of 61 percent. The place was hugely important until bridges were built a few centuries ago.”Īn atmospheric high-pressure system driven by climate change has left parts of the Iberian Peninsula at their driest in 1,200 years, according to a modeling study published in July in the journal Nature Geoscience. ![]() “The dolmen overlooked one of the few spots where it was possible to cross the Tagus River, which divided the west half of Spain from the east. “It helps you to remember that the place was, for millenniums, a strategic gateway connecting the south and the north of the Iberian Peninsula,” he said. She called their reappearance “the past emerging from the waters.”Īngel Castaño, a philologist who lives near the artificial lake and serves as the president of a local cultural association, likens the megalith to a gigantic eye gazing into prehistoric Spain. Primitiva Bueno Ramírez, an archaeologist at the University of Alcalá in Madrid who has studied this dolmen for three decades, sees the menhirs as frozen fragments of history. Both the capstone and the tumulus were dismantled in 1925 during an excavation led by Hugo Obermaier, a Spanish-German anthropologist and prehistorian. The stones, or menhirs - some as tall as six feet - buttressed a massive capstone set in a tumulus, or a mound of earth and pebbles. What remains of the Guadalperal complex is a ring of quartzite, 117 feet in diameter, surrounding 144 jagged granite standing stones, many of which are no longer standing. ![]() The one that just reappeared in Spain dates to the fourth or fifth millennium B.C., which makes it as much as 2,000 years older than its Celtic cousin on the Salisbury Plain in England. The remnants of this Bronze Age sepulcher, nicknamed the Spanish Stonehenge, are now fully exposed for only the fifth time since the area was deliberately flooded in 1963 as part of a rural development project.ĭolmens were single-chambered tombs that often combined religious ceremony with precise sun sightings. Like the skeleton of an extinct sea monster, the Dolmen of Guadalperal has resurfaced from the depths of the Valdecañas reservoir in western Spain, where Europe’s persistent drought has caused water levels to plummet and submerged monuments to come to light. ![]()
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