Altamira Cave

For some years I have wanted to visit the Altamira cave a few miles from Santander, a cave system with impressive prehistoric paintings covering several millennia. A rockfall had blocked the cave entrance at some point in prehistory so it was not 'discovered' until the late 1800s and caused quite a stir at the time; for a while it was deemed a fake because of the quality of the drawings and the freshness of the pigments. It eventually became a huge attraction but was closed for five years in 1977 because of damage to the paintings from moisture and carbon dioxide from people’s breath. Now the visitor numbers have been severely limited (currently 500 a year and with a waiting list that is full three years ahead) so my visit would actually be to a nearby replica of the Altamira main cave hall, something completed in 2001 to meet the tourist demand.

An hour and a half on train and bus and a half hour walk through countryside got me to the area of the cave and the museum with its replica. A short film on the generations of people who had used and decorated the caves (who knew Neanderthals and ancient humans spoke perfect Spanish?) and then we were let loose into the replica cave complete with archeological trenches and tools. If it were not for the fact that the 'cave' lacked that subterranean coolness that you would normally experience you could be forgiven for thinking you were in the real thing: realistic cracked walls and textured surfaces looking for all the world like rock. You weave your way down into the deepest cavern where the paintings are, spread mostly on the ceiling and entirely filling it.

Walking to the cave

Walking down into the 'cave'

My journey through Spain has been about seeking something of a country's history and someone's past. Here was something that fell through the gaps, preceding history and made by people we can never hope to properly understand, something I could not benchmark against the world of today. But what I was looking at, what it represented even as a replica, was something special. The main cave ceiling includes pictures of animals, mostly bisons but also hinds, horses, goats, handprints and indecipherable symbols all in red ochre and black. The natural contours of the rock, the bumps and the cracks, have been incorporated into the art so a smooth lump of rock standing proud from the surface might form the body of a bison or a crack may partially define the outline of some animal. There is imagination here, the aim to exploit the 'canvas' to best effect, but there is little else you can say of the artists, their intentions and how their society was to interpret these drawings. It is the unanswered that makes them so fascinating. 

More extraordinary still for me is the age of the paintings, or more particularly the age range. The originals have been dated from between 36,000 years and 14,500 years old, a period of over 20,000 years, representing a thousand generations of art all in one place. There has been restraint here, no overwhelming desire to replace 'the old and outdated', it has all been retained for viewing like an extraordinarily curated natural museum. My mind wondered at such continuity and what the retention of art from long lost - but seemingly not forgotten - generations might have meant to those that had been here. 

Main cave ceiling 

Bison paintings 

After the cave I spent a while in the attached museum. It contains a lot of information on human development, the history of investigating the cave paintings and examples of other cave paintings from elsewhere in the area. It was then back to Santander and into that quiet zone after everything shuts for the afternoon and before it opens again in the evenings. 

This evening I had hoped to visit a city air raid shelter from the Civil War. It stood out as an attraction as there seems to be very little in Spain that covers that conflict, in part I think due to the 'Pacto del Ovido', the pact of forgetting that aims to subdue the memory of that destructive and polarising conflict which directly affected many still alive today. It formed an interesting contrast to the caves I saw earlier which seem dedicated to remembering. Unfortunately, although it supposedly opened at five I found its street entrance locked and barred. I saw on line that I could buy a ticket for six so I headed to a nearby bar for a drink and went back only to find it still shut. A visit to the cathedral was thwarted by an ongoing Mass and tickets for the city history museum in the cathedral bell tower were limited in numbers and were sold out for the day. I was assured that the air raid shelter would be open as there were tickets available for seven so I headed back there to find it still shut, concluding that most likely, unless people bought tickets online, nobody went to open up. Giving up on museums I decided to round off my Spanish adventure with a seafood dinner at a restaurant near my hotel but my bad luck continued: Google said it was open but unfortunately it was not.

Tomorrow I catch my ferry to the UK. It might not depart until early afternoon but that is still not time enough for me to visit one of the late opening museums in the morning and get to the ferry in time to check-in so I have now seen as much of Santander as I can on this visit. It seems the last hours of my time in Spain are to end with a fizzle rather than a bang: a quiet evening tonight, an empty morning tomorrow and then over thirty hours of time to kill on the ferry.