World-Class Rock Art at Seminole Canyon State Park & Historic Site

Seminole Canyon State Park & Historic Site is located 40 miles west of Del Rio, Texas. Its interpretive center exhibits provide an overview of the rock painting tapestry that awaits visitors but belies their scale of magnificence. Guided tours of Fate Bell rock-shelter are available, together with Presa Canyon (involving strenuous hiking), and Upper Canyon, but nothing will prepare you for the beauty and impressiveness of the world-class rock art that exists at this state park location.

A few of the paintings depict animal figures in simplified fashion, including mountain lions, deer, turtles, rabbits, and birds. Still, others portray human figures, some with outstretched arms, some holding a staff or perhaps a spear. The representation of humans includes rectangular bodies; some without heads; some with animalistic heads including deer or birds. And in some instances, fringed lines radiate from these existences.

Featured in this video by Texas Parks and Wildlife on their official YouTube Channel, the park features Pecos River-style rock art, characterized by monumental, multi-colored pictographs. Ages of wind and water have carved a myriad of canyons out of the rolling plateau that surrounds Lake Amistad in this region. These same natural forces carved into the limestone canyon walls forming numerous overhangs which, for eons, provided rock-shelter living quarters and ceremonial sites for the prehistoric people of Texas. Visit a different type of gallery at Seminole Canyon State Park & Historic Site, where art and living intertwined, leaving behind only remnants of a society existing at a time when world-class rock art may have been frowned upon, if for nothing other than telling you where to hunt, how to survive, and what to expect from life.