The President of the Diputación de Alicante, César Sánchez, inaugurated the renovation of the Pla de Petracos Cave Art Centre. The project has benefited from a 50,000 injection in order to proceed to the spatial and museographic adaptation of space, with a high quality audiovisual production which deals with the paintings and brings the visitor closer to the origin of the creators of this enclave, its landscape and its surroundings.
The Diputación de Alicante, together with the MARQhas been collaborating for years with the town council in the promotion of actions aimed at protecting and disseminating this artistic legacy declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO and which, in 1998, meant enhancing the value of the ensemble and protecting it, as well as making it easier for the public to visit. Since the beginning of this cooperation, the following have passed through the installation around 200,000 visitors.
The head of the provincial institution specified that ".the technicians and specialists of the Provincial Council have done an extraordinary job, with a first-class cultural facility ready to receive visitors and a renewed museographic discourse.". Sánchez also highlighted the "The new spatial adaptation of the sanctuary's hall where an audiovisual is projected explaining the history of the people who populated this place 7,000 years ago".
The visit was attended, in addition to the local mayor, Vicente Tomás Estarlichthe deputy for architecture, Jaime LloretThe director of this area in the Provincial Council, Rafael Pérezthe managing director of the MARQ, José Alberto Cortésand the Director of Exhibitions at the Alicante museum, Jorge Soleramong other authorities.
The project for the renovation of the Cave Art Centre in Castell de Castells, directed by the same technicians who have been carrying out all the actions to date to enhance its value, Jorge A. Soler and Rafael PérezThe exhibition focuses on a high quality audiovisual production that deals with the paintings, bringing us closer to the origin of their creators, their landscape and environment.
The cultural achievements of the Neolithic and its process of diffusion along the Mediterranean coast are dealt with in a script that will bring the public closer to the epic that was the arrival on our coasts of the first people carrying agricultural and livestock knowledge, transporting goods, seeds and animals in boats. This main projection will be preceded by a video display of the techniques used to make objects from the 6th millennium BC, obtained through painstaking Experimental Archaeology activities, accompanied by objects manufactured using these practices, which will be shown inside display cases. Drawings and texts will complete all this informative support which, in a suggestive way, reveal the habitat, the use of the cavities or the religious sentiment that the paintings would signify. All of this is mounted on a renewed spatial conception and adaptation of the premises occupied by the museum service.
Work to improve the facility forced the closure of the Rock Art Interpretation Centre in November 2015. Today, after a huge amount of work carried out by numerous technicians and specialists, this first-class cultural facility is ready to welcome visitors with a renewed museographic discourse, a new spatial adaptation and a room in the sanctuary where an audiovisual is projected that explains in a moving way a history of seven thousand years ago.
The investment made for the spatial and museographic adaptation, taken from the budgetary applications of the current collaboration agreement, has been €50,000.
The Pla de Petracos is an exceptional site as it is home to one of the most important Neolithic artistic ensembles in Europe. The motifs of Macroschematic Art The characteristic features of the site date back to the early stages of the spread of agriculture and domestication on the Mediterranean side of the Iberian Peninsula.
More than 7,000 years agopeople with knowledge of agriculture and livestock farming reached these western Mediterranean coasts. Their presence is the result of a long process of coastal diffusion that ultimately originated in the Near East.
The women and men who carried this knowledge came from somewhere near the Mediterranean. Taking care not to stray far from the coast, they sailed in canoes in which they carried with great care wheat and barley seeds and sheep and goat pairs with the intention of ensuring their subsistence wherever they arrived. Fortune brought them to these lands. Millennia later, we admire the perfection of his ceramics and of all his material creations and we are moved and moved by his Art.The main legacy of the beliefs of those pioneers.
The coherence observed in the motifs at Pla de Petracos evokes the rites and beliefs of the first Neolithic settlers. In four shelters there are representations that suggest the practice of rites in front of the rocky outcrop that contains them. A rock juts out from the ground, aligned with respect to the central shelter of the group, where the main orante or motif is located. This circumstance, which is thought to be no coincidence, together with the arrangement of the pictorial motifs, in the manner of a spatial altarpiece, makes the site a one of the earliest manifestations of religious architecture, a sanctuary.
The Provincial Council of Alicante and the Castell de Castells Town Council have been collaborating for years in the development of actions aimed at the protection and dissemination of this artistic legacy. Thus, in 1998, the Pla de Petracos complex was "enhanced" with a structure that, while protecting the site, has made it easier for the public to visit and understand it. In November 2000, a Collaboration Agreement between the Town Council of Castell de Castells and the Provincial Institution for the "establishment of a Museum Service", with a duration of ten years and an annual investment in conservation and updating of this service of more than thirty thousand euros per year.
This agreement reached its climax in 2003 when, in the same building as the Town Hall, a museum was set up with the dual intention of highlighting the ethnographic assets of this mountain village in Alicante and serving as an interpretation centre for the important Rock Art collection. The agreement, managed through the Department of Architecture and the Provincial Archaeological Museum, is still in force after its renewal for another ten years, until 31 December 2020.
Over the years since the beginning of this collaboration, around 200,000 visitors, The dissemination of the contents of the so-called Macro-schematic Art was achieved through the evocation of the beliefs and values that characterised those Neolithic populations. The important cultural value of what is preserved and disseminated, the good results of the actions undertaken, the progress of scientific knowledge produced in the 21st century and the need to update the audiovisual products available at the Cave Art Centre, make it necessary to renew the montage offered there.
