A megalithic monument older than Egypt's pyramids and England's Stonehenge recently emerged from the water in Spain as a drought took hold of the country, according to a rumor that spread in July 2025.
For example, a July 14, 2025, post on Facebook posted an image of the supposed monument with a long explanation (archived):
The photograph showed an aerial view of a circular rock formation near the water's edge. The caption read, in part:
A recent drought in southern Spain has led to the remarkable re-emergence of a 7,000-year-old megalithic monument near the province of Huelva. This archaeological site, long hidden by water and sediment, has now been brought to light by changing environmental conditions. The structure is believed to have been constructed by prehistoric communities that once thrived on the Iberian Peninsula, revealing their advanced understanding of architecture, alignment, and community organization well before the rise of many known ancient civilizations.
What makes this discovery particularly significant is its age estimated to be around 7,000 years old placing it approximately 2,000 years before the construction of the Egyptian Pyramids and Stonehenge. This challenges conventional historical timelines and highlights the sophisticated capabilities of early Iberian societies. These ancient builders used massive stones to create what may have been ceremonial or astronomical structures, aligning them with natural elements or celestial events, much like their later counterparts in other parts of the world.
The post had received 191,000 reactions and 19,000 shares as of this writing. Variations of this post appeared on Facebook and X, with different photographs.
The monument is real, and it has emerged in recent years during droughts. However, the posts were wrong on some details.
The monument in question is known as the Dolmen or the "Treasure" of Guadalperal. It is located in the province of Cáceres — not Huelva, as the posts claimed — in the autonomous region of Extremadura. Typically submerged in the reservoir of Valdecañas, it has come out either fully or partially, during droughts. In recent years, this happened in 2019 and 2022.
The site has long been the object of archaeological research, as a search on Google Scholar revealed. Excavated between 1925 and 1927 by German archaeologist Hugo Obermaier, the Dolmen of Guadalperal was found to have been built between 5000 and 3000 B.C., which indeed makes it older than Stonehenge (3000 to 1500 B.C.) and the pyramids in Egypt (2700 to 2200 B.C.).
The site has been submerged since 1963, as the Valdecañas dam was nearing completion. The resulting reservoir along the Tagus River submerged other archaeological sites, including many that dated from the Roman Empire.
As climate change increased the frequency of droughts, the Spanish government sought to prevent archaeological looting of the emerged sites, while researchers rushed to catalog them.
However, the monument had not emerged in 2025 as the reservoir was full of water, according to an email from a spokesperson for Valdecañas Multiaventura, a company that offers outdoors activities and experiences on and around the reservoir and the Tiétar River, a tributary of the Tagus River.