The Mural of the Prehistory

The Mural of the Prehistory. . , The Mural, one of the largest in the world, represents the life of the first inhabitants of the Cuban archipelago. During the early days of 1959, Dr. Antonio Núñez Jimenez told Fidel Castro about his visits to these mountains where had been found fossils of fish, a skull of a big saurian and evidence of the aboriginal settlements found in local caves. This talk led the idea of a pictorial mural on the wall of this mogote. On September 6 the work was carried out to clean the rock., Painting began in March 1960, and it lasted four years. The Cuban painter Leovigildo Gonzalez Murillo, who had studied with the great Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, was chosen for the task. The painting has a surface area of 80 meters in height and 120 meters in length and the lines were drawn by farmers of the locality who, hanging by strong ropes, were attached to parachute harnesses and directed from the ground by the painter by means of a microphone and using binoculars., The Megalocnus, Plesiosaurus, the Ammonites and the other figures describe the evolution of the life in Cuba, that was set down for the posterity in the Mural of the Prehistory and it represents the great biological and geological process that took place on this region.