Going Paleo (Spanish Cave Style)

Filing this one under Personal Interests That Emerged While Traveling.

I can’t remember what sent me down a “prehistoric caves” rabbit hole during our Spain stay—probably some mention on a Málaga tourism site—but once I started in, it was hard to stop bouncing around websites, especially on realizing the country is home to some ejemplos espectaculares. 

The accounts I read and the images I saw were transporting. Otherworldly rock formations! Sprawling subterranean lakes! Chance uncoverings by hikers of artifact-filled caves that had been sealed for millennia! Cave walls still dancing with horses, deer, bison, and long-extinct animals tens of thousands of years after they were painted by our Paleolithic ancestors!

Although most of Spain’s prehistoric caves are in the north, there are several in the Andalucia/southern region. I got to visit a few of these: sistema Hundidero-Gato, La Cueva del Tesoro, and Cueva de la Pileta.

Sistema Hundidero-Gato (Benaoján)

The three of us saw Cueva del Gato toward the end of a weekend spent in nearby Ronda—a storybook town that’s a future blog post all its own.

Do you see the above and think cat mouth? That’s the name’s rationale. 

Also shown are waters of the Guardares River, which reach this point after flowing underground for four kilometers.

That blue was a dream. 

This is one end of the Hundidero-Gato cave system, the other end being the entrance to Cueva de Hundidero, which towers at 50 meters high. We drove from Gato to Hundidero in a half hour. 

Many Neolithic artifacts have been found at Hundidero, including decorated jugs, stone tools, and jewelry. Apparently there are also cave paintings tucked away in cracks of the rock.

Lotta limestone in these parts. Makes me think of the Neverending Story’s Rock Biter, ha. (“Mmm, that was limestone, with a dash of quartz.”)

I didn’t go as far inside as I was permitted to, cuz I needed to get back to my boys, who were waiting for me at the top of the steep path down.

In the days after, I read more about sistema Hundidero-Gato and watched YouTubes of cavers making their way from one end to the other. Exciting and anxiety provoking! Especially knowing that flash flooding and cold water temps have caused several deaths over the years. 

It also made me want to rewatch The Descent, which is some good horror.

La Cueva del Tesoro (Rincón de la Victoria)

Another week, Flynn and I bused 45 minutes to the municipality of Rincón de la Victoria to check out La Cueva del Tesoro, which dates to the Jurassic era and is one of three known caves of marine origin in the world.

As centuries-old legend has it, the cave houses treasure (hence the name) deposited by Arab kings in the 12th century to protect it against the advancing armies of the Catholic Monarchs. Many have ventured into the depths since, hoping to find it, including the Swiss dude Antonio de la Nari, who searched for the treasure for 20 years. Working with dynamite, he opened several cave corridors and a well. Unfortunately, in 1847, he also blew himself up. His ghost, with a long white beard and only visible from the waist down (but how does that work?), is said to haunt the cave. (I love this stuff.)

There’s a great exhibition room at the top/entrance of the cave with lots of helpful detail in English alongside the Spanish. I read about this and that, including the substances and techniques used in cave art made 30,000 to 5,000 years ago. That some of this art remains today and we’re able to just go look at it is WILD.

Here’s what we saw on our initial descent:

I read somewhere a description of these formations as “like some kind of alien skeleton,” which fits.

Back when, the sea created “galleries” typical of underwater caves, with columns and gorges. Later, once the area above sea level emerged, fresh water produced all sorts of stalactites and stalagmites. Today there are about 500 meters of galleries and an area of freshwater “lakes” (small ponds) that make up the Tesoro system. Apparently there are also some cave paintings, though these galleries aren’t accessible to the public for safety and preservation reasons.

Some of the walls are coated with glossy, sparkling crystals from top to bottom. As Flynn will attest, I was mildly freaking out. 

The matrices, the shine. And a neat texture—bumpy but buffed.

On returning to the exhibition room and checking out more panels, I thought about the process of attempting to decode marks like these. I mean, sometimes you’re clearly looking at a horse/goat/hand/whatever, but other times, including in some examples shown above, it’s just a few scant lines and dots that (skilled, I know!) people are working with to make best guesses about what people ~20,000 years ago (in the case of La Cueva del Tesoro) were expressing. 

Wild.

Cueva de la Pileta (Benaoján)

Otro día, otra cueva! This one holds an extra special place in my heart. 

Cueva de la Pileta (“Cave of the Pool”) is a half-hour drive from the aforementioned and aforevisited Ronda—like sistema Hundidero-Gato, located in the town of Benaoján. It’s referenced on many Spanish cave exploration websites, and when I realized we’d been really close to it in December, I was bummed to have missed checking it out. 

On proposing we make a day trip of it our last week in Málaga, I got a lukewarm response from Ray and Flynn, so we decided they’d stay back for Dudes Day (ha) while I struck out on my own. 

A 2.5-hour train + cab ride after setting out, I found myself at the bottom of the steep stair climb to Pileta’s entrance.

It was the prettiest day, with the prettiest little irises along the climb.

Made it.

Cueva de la Pileta has been family-stewarded since its rediscovery in 1905, and as our tour guide, Ainhoa, who’s also the great granddaughter of the man who rediscovered the cave, explained, the family takes a lot of care in its preservation. Besides no photography, groups are capped at 25 (there were just four in my group), visitors are kept out of the small galleries where human respiration (the CO2) can damage the paintings, and no artificial cave openings have been added to the complex (eg, to increase visitor volume), as these mess with air flow so can also cause damage.

From the family’s website:

The Cave of the Pileta has been linked to the Bullón family since its discovery by José Bullón Lobato, the farmer who leased the farm on which it is located.

It was on a spring day in 1905 that José decided to explore a chasm near his house from which flocks of bats came out every dusk. His purpose was to look for guano to fertilize the land and increase production . . . The abyss turned out to be the entrance to a large cave that amazed him, and in which he found bones, ceramic pots and paintings on the walls, representing animals and signs he had never seen.

In the years following, José shared his experience and researchers confirmed the historical significance of the cave and its treasures and did some cataloging of the findings. José, who had spent many hours in the cave and so knew its layout well, was closely involved. Another interesting bit I read is that up until that point, José, like most people at the time, hadn’t heard of prehistoric cultures and so learned a ton from the collaboration.

While touring, with the help of small lanterns we each carried + our guide’s flashlight (no mineral-bleaching track lighting in this cave!), we saw some schematic drawings, a horse, a fish, and a handful of other representations. Standing ten feet from these pieces—still observable ~20,000 years after humans created them using charcoal, ochre, and animal fat—was kinda stupefying. Twenty thousand years ago. It’s basically nonsense. Although I felt pricks of wonder/awe as I stood taking it all in, I felt a real sense of remove, too.

Also seen, also stupefying: portions of cave wall blackened with soot from fires made many millennia ago. 

And we heard things! At one point our guide intentionally stamped on the stone floor and the sound reverberated beneath us. Uh. Turns out there was a bigger hall/gallery just four meters beneath our feet. Then there were the organ pipes—stalactites with hollow cores that Ainhoa “played” by tapping with her flashlight. 

At some point it occurred to me what a treat it would be to join Pileta’s presently hibernating bats, which number ~4,000, for a nap. Nap dreams can be so lucid and cool; imagine what they might be like in a prehistoric cave.

Toward the end of the tour, Ainhoa asked us to turn off our lanterns. She switched her flashlight off and the five of us stood for several seconds in total darkness and quiet, all that ancient art still swirling.

We exited the cave to upper-60s and bright sun on these shrubby hills. (As often during our time in Spain, it was easy to forget it was winter.) I sat down on some grass near an olive tree and flipped through my new book, purchased at the end of the tour, while waiting for my cab back to Ronda. It was so pleasant. I felt good, my forehead warm and my mind buzzing, but not in a hectic way, with everything I’d just encountered.

I talked a while with Ainhoa, who told me her family has held onto José’s farmhouse through the years (her dad lives there now), which is visible in the above photo.

I heard a little more about various cave findings, about what it’s like for Ainhoa and her family to take visitors through the space, and about the complicated relationship between the family and the Andalusian government with respect to cave operations. 

The Pileta Cave, authored by the Bullón family, is the book I picked up and which I finished on the train ride back to Málaga.

Pictured above are some of the drawings I saw, including the schematics (those comb-looking ones are thought to represent passing time), the horse (such grace), the zoomorphic figures, and “Icarus.”

That goat though! Didn’t glimpse it in person, but yow. The curves, the eye, the movement.

Ps, in Cueva de la Pileta, the yellow paintings are the oldest, followed by the red and then the black charcoal ones.

Saw this beauty! One of Pileta’s most well-known drawings. It’s about 20,000 years old, five feet long, and has what’s thought to be the outline of a seal inside it.

More marvels. We were told not to touch any of the formations, as skin oils can affect their growth.

A Beatles recording session! And haha re: Queen’s Bathroom specs.

At least four Neolithic skeletons have been found at Pileta, including this one—a ~12-year-old female who lived ~7,000 years ago—petrified on the cave wall.

Interesting theory about the corrals. But I’m more interested in the round guys with the little hairs and an air of celebration about them. Cuties! According to Ainhoa they’ve been referred to as turtles, but only because no one’s come up with anything better.

The caves we need to return to

I recently stumbled across an article I love, including for the cave discovery history the writer details and the musings on the presence of movement in so much of this ancient art:

Look closely, and you see that the animal figures are usually composed of superimposed lines, suggesting that new arrivals in the cave painted over the lines that were already there, more or less like children learning to write the letters of the alphabet. So the cave was not merely a museum. It was an art school where people learned to paint from those who had come before them, and went on to apply their skills to the next suitable cave they came across. In the process, and with some help from flickering lights, they created animation. The movement of bands of people across the landscape led to the apparent movement of animals on the cave walls. 

Ahhh. And:

It’s the Paleolithic caves we need to return to, and not just because they are still capable of inspiring transcendent experiences and connecting us with the long-lost natural world. We should be drawn back to them for the message they have reliably preserved for more than 10,000 generations. Granted, it was not intended for us, this message, nor could its authors have imagined such perverse and self-destructive descendants as we have become. But it’s in our hands now, still illegible unless we push back hard against the artificial dividing line between history and prehistory, hieroglyphs and petroglyphs, between the ‘primitive’ and the ‘advanced.’ This will take all of our skills and knowledge–from art history to uranium-thorium dating techniques to best practices for international cooperation. But it will be worth the effort, because our Paleolithic ancestors, with their faceless humanoids and capacity for silliness, seem to have known something we strain to imagine.

They knew where they stood in the scheme of things, which was not very high, and this seems to have made them laugh. I strongly suspect that we will not survive the mass extinction we have prepared for ourselves unless we too finally get the joke.

Yes.

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Thanks for reading! And please share any adventuras de cuevas of your own; I would love to visit vicariously. I would also love related book/article/documentary recs (besides Cave of Forgotten Dreams, which I recently rewatched, this time with the kiddo).