The Maltravieso Cave is a cave located in the city of Cáceres, Spain, specifically on Avenida de Cervantes, and curiously enough, it is now part of the town centre of Cáceres.

It was occupied by man at different times in prehistoric times.

A recent study dates the Maltravieso hand paintings to a much earlier date than previously thought.

The international research led by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and the University of Southampton, in which Spanish archaeologists have collaborated and which has used uranium-thorium dating, has been published in the American journal Science and fixes the age of one of the hands in the cave at 66,700 years, which could certify that its authors were Neanderthals, because there is no evidence of the presence of Homo sapiens in the Iberian Peninsula at that time.

According to existing data, there were three periods of use of the cave: Lower Palaeolithic, Upper Palaeolithic and Bronze Age.

The most recurrent and well-known motif in the Maltravieso cave are the negative hands, of which more than seventy have been counted; alongside them, there are also a large number of ideomorphs; but more recent research has documented partial painted representations of an equid, a caprid, a cervid and a bovid, as well as other engraved animals that are more difficult to interpret, at least two caprids, a cervid and a bovid. These handprints, whether positive, negative or mixed, are still difficult for archaeologists to interpret.