Prehistoric cave art in Spain
Echoes of Eternity: The Living Caves of Cantabria, Spain
Was the world ever more alive?
“The cave is alive.”
That’s what the tour guide said. And said it again. And again. Her halting English words fluttered back from the fluted walls of the tunnel, glancing off stalactites and stalagmites, curling around rock formations that took a hundred million years to emerge.
The cave is alive. The river that carved it out is gone, sunken further underground to burble and chatter in lightless passages at the foundations of the world. The money the cave is named after, the twenty gold pieces dating back to the sixteenth century, has vanished away to some museum or another we never visited.
The cave continues to grow, to change, too slow for the human eye to see, though fast enough for sensitive instruments to record. The slow drip of limestone forms columns and towers connecting the ceiling and floor. Rainwater carves out new passages and closes old ones.
And in the tight black space of the gallery we came to see, the paintings made of charcoal and animal grease 13,000 years ago are fading, just a little, every day.
The caves of Monte Castillo
It’s more than an hour’s drive from the Basque city of Bilbao in northwest Spain to Monte Castillo. For a while, the road hugs the coast. Slick with rain that rises from the wild Atlantic that has battered the frowning cliffs into works of art over millions of years, the road shines like a mirror. Headlights cast long beams leading into the future the way photons will, always looking for somewhere new.
To our eyes, sunburned from too long on the Mediterranean and used to an already-arid climate experiencing its worst drought in history, the dripping forests of Cantabria looked impossibly lush and green in the emerald riot of spring.
Age, of course, is relative. The person who spends their whole life in motion ages more slowly than the one who gathers moss. The cars and the trains and especially the planes, never mind the spaceships, divorce us from the normal passage of time, so that a clock kept in perpetual rapid motion starts to lag behind one safe on the ground.
It’s not that the clock malfunctions. It’s that time doesn’t flow at the same rate everywhere.
But the people who painted the caves didn’t know that.
They couldn’t imagine our world the way we can imagine theirs, through isotopes and radioactive decay and x-rays and picks and shovels. The future, our empty mechanized age, cast no shadow to cloud their campfires.
Monte Castillo is home to four different caves where you can see prehistoric art. And the wider Cantabria region houses one of the world’s greatest collections of ancient art.
There are other painted caves. Blombos Cave in South Africa has carved stones that date back to before humans ever made their way to Europe. Lubang Jeriji Saléh in Indonesia has what may be the oldest painting in the world. Chauvet in France is famous for its wealth of Paleolithic art. But few places on earth can compare to the painted caves of Cantabria.
That’s what we came to see.
Because very great age can be impressive all by itself, but it needs that human touch to spark the imagination. The cave itself, the living cave, is much older than the paintings it contains, but geology struggles to move the heart.
The paintings do.
In the caves of Cantabria, you watch our species be born. Not the bones and tendons and muscles that make us the gangly bipeds that we are, but the symbolic network of representation and meaning that makes us what we are. The thing we brought to the world, and maybe the universe, for the very first time. In the geological scale, we are just a blip, barely even arrived, ignorant babies in the kingdom of other mammals, let alone reptiles, insects, fish, and fungi.
The water-sculpted rocks of Monte Castillo still remember a world without life of any kind, when limestone dropped cold tears into echoing pools for nothing to hear.
But none of it meant anything until we arrived.
With animal grease and charcoal and red ochre, with songs and chants and flickering torchlight, we made the world mean something. The symbols painted inside the caves may be foreign to us now, but there isn’t a single one of us who can’t understand what they mean.
It drifted down in pale sheets from the low grey sky. It dripped from the skin of broad deciduous leaves, doomed in six months’ time. We showed up at the museum in Puente Viesgo to pick up our pre-booked tickets and tentatively asked the woman behind the counter, “¿hablas ingles?”
“A little,” she said and proceeded to tell us how to get the caves with astonishing fluency.
“You’ll want to drive in this rain,” she said. “This is a Paleolithic day.”
So we drove the switchback road up the mountain, our tires hissing on the mirrored tarmac, until we reached the caves.
There are four of them on Monte Castillo, but two are closed to preserve the delicate art inside. That leaves Las Monedas and El Castillo. We visited both.
At Las Monedas, we were almost the only people there. Just us and a family of four who spoke some language I couldn’t identify. The guide started her tour in Spanish, then realized she was the only Spanish speaker in the cave and switched to English. Her flashlight picked out the cave’s beautiful geological features before leading us to the cramped and pitch-black gallery where she showed us the paintings on the walls. Reindeer, bison, horses, goats, and other animals, the creatures these people depended on for their survival. The wild spirits that shared their world.
El Castillo is better known and better visited. There, we were part of a group of fifteen, the tour guide switching from Spanish to English as his flashlight danced across the walls.
Here, the art is different. Older. Much older. El Castillo may have the oldest painting in the world, a red disk painted on the wall before our species had even reached Europe. Another human species got here first, braving the swirling snows and the bitter cold of the Ice Age to leave proof of their existence in crude art and genetic markers I carry in the marrow of my bones.
Younger, but not by much, are the stencils on the walls. Negative white handprints on a field of red, reaching out through liquid rock to touch your own. But no tocar, the guide warned us before we went in. No touching. No matter how tempting the impulse to reach across thirty thousand years and make contact with someone who lived in an entirely different world and yet had the same heart, the same mind, the same eyes looking out on that world and looking in to create something that can still move us today.
Analysis of the stenciled hands suggests that every group of Paleolithic society was represented. Men, women, and children. In a long narrow gallery beneath the mountain, the guide showed us a long line of round red marks on the wall, accompanied by a series of mysterious curved lines. Maybe a lunar calendar, he explained. After all, people who rely on hunting need to know the phases of the moon.
Or perhaps it was a map of the constellations, our distant ancestors bringing the star-flecked heavens we have lost underground with them to splash celestial light on the melting walls.
“A tattoo,” the guide at El Castillo said, his flashlight beam moving across the haunting hands reaching out from the walls and ceiling above us, longing for contact after three hundred centuries.
Limestone is porous. The pigment seeps into the rock and clings on forever. And after we’re gone, after Hitler and Einstein and Napoleon and Caesar have been forgotten, these anonymous handprints will stay on the wall of the cave to tell an indifferent universe that we were here.
No touching
The number of people entering these caves is tightly controlled. At nearby Altamira, the Sistine Chapel of Paleolithic art, they’ve had to close the caves and build a cheesy replica for tourists to visit.
At El Castillo and Las Monedas, the paintings are protected by diligent guides and, where necessary, chicken wire to keep greasy modern fingertips away. Add your own grease and salts and filth to these paintings, and you hasten their destruction. Even your breath is bringing them down.
Tattoos are supposed to last forever, but my twenty-year-old ink is already looking shabby. The prehistoric art in the caves of Monte Castillo still speaks to us now, still echoes down through unfathomable time to touch the same hearts in an entirely different world. But thirty thousand years is not forever.
The cave is alive. It moves and grows, and try as we might, we can’t stop it. What seems eternal is always conditional. Our grandmother’s handprints painted onto the wall will outlive us, but they won’t last forever. The cave is alive, and everything that is alive is doomed to regenerate itself, cell by cell, atom by atom.
Don’t touch. Just look. And you’ll see an entire universe being born.
A species being raised out of the dirt to contemplate existence with a kind of eye that had never existed before. A creature that lives in time, that feels it passing like it feels the cold breath of the caves, the damp air that slicks your hair back to your scalp. The breath that boils out of you and shaves off another little piece of ancient paintings that cannot endure forever.
The cave is alive. The world is alive. Our ancestors understood that in a way that is lost to modern wage slaves, inheritors of machines and smoke. Their world was far harsher than ours, a world of stone spear points, violence, and blood. A world without kings, without politics, without possessions, you couldn’t make yourself. All that mattered was the food you ate and the stars you chased and the people you loved. A cold and pitiless magnificence that spoke through your words and your paintings and the breath that boils out of you to destroy everything you touch.
In these lightless underground passages, the world we long ago left behind clings on, its teeth and claws red as the ochre the cave painters used to decorate the bodies of their dead.
Everything has changed, and nothing has.
And this, too, is sliding away. One tour after another, one breath after the last, peels the ancient paint off the walls, soaks the tattoo out of the limestone skin.
To see, to appreciate, to admire, to love, is to destroy. Just like the reindeer and bison and horses our ancestors worshiped and killed.
