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Fuente Nueva 3 is an archaeological site.
A site is a place where people look for very old remains.
More than a million years ago, there was water and mud here, on the shore of a lake.
Mammoth bones have been found here.
The mammoth was an animal like an elephant.
There are two very big mammoth tusks: they are about three and a half metres long.
Stone tools have also been found here.
They are some of the oldest human traces in western Europe.
You can visit the site on a guided visit from the museum.
Fuente Nueva 3 lies east of Orce, near the hamlet of Fuente Nueva, within the Orce Basin Archaeological Zone. Its layers of fine sand and clay were laid down on the edge of an ancient wetland between 1.2 and 1.4 million years ago, according to the different published dates. Today the excavated area is protected under a roof.
The site holds abundant flint and limestone tools in the Oldowan tradition, together with bones of large mammals bearing cut marks and fractures. Its upper level yielded the almost complete skeleton of a female southern mammoth (Mammuthus meridionalis) surrounded by giant hyena coprolites; a study published in 2024 identified on its bones marks compatible with human cuts, an interpretation other researchers dispute.
The site's fauna includes hippos, horses, rhinoceroses, giant deer, bears, canids and sabre-toothed cats. It has no opening hours of its own: visits are arranged through the Museum of the First Settlers of Europe and the Tourist Office. The augmented reality experience on this page is a demonstration.
Sample 3D model: «Spotted hyena», by Poly by Google, licensed CC BY 3.0, via Poly Pizza. It is a present-day spotted hyena, not a reconstruction of the giant hyena of Orce. Sample model for the demonstration; the project models are produced and validated with the scientific directors of the sites.
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