Lost Spanish Stonehenge Emerges After Being Submerged For 50 Years

‘Spanish Stonehenge’ Re-emerges after 50 Years Due to Drought

A Spanish Stonehenge was spotted by Nasa at the international space station. It’s a was underwater for 50 years, it's only recently shown its face again because the area has experienced a severe drought. So what do we know about this lost Spanish Stonehenge?

Lost Spanish Stonehenge Emerges After Being Submerged For 50 Years

An intense drought has exposed a 4 thousand-year-old Stonehenge in Spain, as in it’s a circle of stones similar to Stonehenge in the UK, one of the best known prehistoric monuments in Europe. This long lost Spanish Stonehenge has been underwater in Spain's Valdecanas reservoir. In fact, its tallest pillars sometimes make appearances at the surface like the fingers of a drowning swimmer. but an intense drought over the last few months has caused the waters in the reservoir to dry up enough to reveal this very old, very mysterious structure. So here’s what we know about this site, there are 150 stones arranged in an oval.

They were built by copper or bronze age locals on the banks of the Tagus river. Its believed to be at least 4 thousand years old and its referred to as the Dolmen Guadalperal. The pillars that stand upright are called orthostats and they look very similar to the megaliths found at Britain's Stonehenge. There are also other ones like it but Stonehenge is the most famous. Over many many generations, more of these slabs were positioned upright, forming a structure. Its thought that maybe this site was a tomb of some sort, similar to Stonehenge. It's possible that there used to be relics here, but if there were relics, they were probably stolen.

According to Anthropologist Hugo Obermaier who analyzed the structure in the ’20s, there were some personal items found there that suggested it might have been a burial site at some point. There’s also a snake carved into one of the horizontal stones at its entrance as well as a human form, which probably held some sort of sacred significance. So why did this cultural site end up underwater? Well, the river was transformed into a reservoir by the Spanish state, there's actually a bunch of historically significant sites from different periods in the area that also ended up submerged. By 1960, the Dolmen was totally underwater. The only reason why it made an appearance now is because Spain is experiencing one of the worst droughts of the century.

Spanish Stonehenge Emerges after and before

The third driest June of the century took place this year, which has been really tough on Spanish farmers. Here’s a snapshot was taken y NASA that shows just how severe the drought has been. This one on the left is from 2013, and the image on the right is from 2019. You can clearly see that the reservoir is getting much more shallow and the shoreline areas around the edge of the reservoir aren’t submerged anymore. But there are plenty of people who are happy about the Dolmen finally making an appearance. As I said before, parts of it do pop up out of the water sometimes, but for the first time in a generation, you can finally see the whole thing. Some people are also arguing that the stones should actually be relocated to a place that’s not, you know, at the bottom of a reservoir so that future generations will be able to visit it. There’s even a change.org petition to raise funds to move the dolmen out of the waters which will rise again.