The Painted Animals of the Red Rocks

Beyond the town, the land changes costume. The pink plaster gives way to pine forest, and out of the forest rise great rounded cliffs of red sandstone, carved by rain and wind into waves and whale backs and half melted castles. The locals call this place the Rodeno pines, and the moment Polly arrives, a red squirrel drops a pine cone on her head by way of welcome.

The squirrel, once she has apologized, leads Polly along a sandy path to a shallow rock shelter. On the smooth red stone, someone has painted animals. Deer with branching antlers, wild goats mid leap, hunters drawn as slim dark strokes. The paint has faded to the color of dried blood and honey, but the animals still move if you look at them sideways.

These paintings are thousands of years old, made by people who knew this forest before it had a name. Today they are protected as world heritage, alongside painted shelters across all of eastern Spain. Crossbills chatter in the pines overhead while Polly studies a painted bird, wing lines still clear after all this time, and feels an odd warm kinship across the centuries.

On the flight back, the evening sun sets the red rocks glowing like coals. Somewhere below, a roe deer steps out between the pines, glances up, and steps back into shadow, exactly as its portrait has been doing on the stone wall for several thousand years. Some things, Polly thinks, simply enjoy being animals here.