Cueva de las Manos

The painted hands are everywhere — stencilled in red, black, white and yellow across the rock of the Pinturas River canyon, beside running guanacos and geometric patterns no one has fully decoded. The oldest were made around 9,300 years ago by people who pressed a palm to the rock and blew ochre through a bone tube, and the stencils have barely faded. They are looking back at you.

Cueva de las Manos holds the most extensive early rock art in the Americas, UNESCO-listed, its painted sequence running from roughly 9,300 years ago to about 700 AD across at least a dozen cultural styles — negative hand stencils first, then hunting scenes and abstract geometry. Researchers read many of the hands as adolescent, possibly the trace of initiation rites among the ancestors of the Tehuelche, and the dry basalt canyon carved by the Río Pinturas preserved the mineral-and-fat pigments with extraordinary completeness. Visits run as timed guided circuits along the site trail, taken in arrival order; the gateway town lies more than 150 kilometres north, so the dependable plan arrives early and provisioned, then extends into the canyon's authorised trails while the light lasts.