Cueva de las Manos
— — hands pressed to stone, nine thousand years on.
Not only on a wall.
“A cave high in the wall of the Río Pinturas canyon, deep in the Santa Cruz province of Patagonia. Hundreds of stencilled handprints fill the rock, pigment blown around hands held flat against the stone, the oldest of them around nine thousand years old. The site is reached by a long drive down Ruta 40 and a short walk above the canyon.
Cueva de las Manos, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Cueva de las Manos sits in the canyon of the Río Pinturas in Argentina's Santa Cruz province, roughly 163 kilometres south of the town of Perito Moreno along Ruta 40. The cave is part of a 600-hectare protected area inscribed by UNESCO in 1999 as a World Heritage Site. The rock walls hold over 800 stencilled hand images plus painted hunting scenes and abstract motifs, attributed to the hunter-gatherer ancestors of the Tehuelche people. The nearest paved highway is the long north-south Ruta 40.
The earliest images at Cueva de las Manos have been dated to around 7,300 BCE, with painting continuing in waves until roughly 700 CE, a span of nearly eight thousand years of use. The hand stencils were made by placing a hand flat against the rock and blowing pigment through a hollow bone. The pigments are mineral-based: iron oxide for red, manganese for black, kaolin for white, natrojarosite for yellow. Most of the hands are left hands, suggesting the painters were holding the bone pipe in the right.
The site is open to visitors with a guided tour only, generally year-round but with reduced winter hours. The usual route runs by car or organised excursion from Perito Moreno town or from the village of Bajo Caracoles, about fifty kilometres from the cave. The closest international airports are at Comodoro Rivadavia and El Calafate, each several hundred kilometres away. The Argentine summer (December through March) brings the most reliable weather; the high-desert winter is cold and the access road can close after snow.