Cave of Altamira

The Cave of Altamira, near Santillana del Mar in Cantabria, holds some of the finest Palaeolithic art in the world, and no other cave in northern Spain has such complex and crowded painting. The cave is about 270 m long, a series of passages in the limestone of Mount Vispieres. People lived at its mouth during the Solutrean and Magdalenian periods, until a rockfall sealed the entrance about 13,000 years ago and preserved everything inside. Uranium-thorium dating shows that painting went on for more than 10,000 years, and some red signs are around 36,000 years old. Altamira is the key site of the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Palaeolithic cave art in northern Spain.

The Polychrome Ceiling of the main hall shows a herd of extinct steppe bison in red and black, together with horses, a large doe and possibly a boar. The painters used charcoal, ochre and haematite, thinning the pigments to create shading, and placed each animal so that the natural bulges of the rock became its shoulders and flanks, giving the figures a sculptural volume. Elsewhere in the cave there are older paintings: horses and goats, abstract signs, and outlines of hands made by blowing pigment around a hand held against the wall.

The paintings' discovery was also a scientific drama. A local man found the cave in 1868. In 1879 the amateur archaeologist Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola was exploring it when his eight-year-old daughter María looked up at the ceiling and saw the bison. Sautuola and the geologist Juan Vilanova published them as Palaeolithic in 1880, and French experts ridiculed them and suggested a forgery. The dispute was only settled in 1902, when similar caves had been found in France and Émile Cartailhac published his famous "Mea culpa d'un sceptique". Sautuola had died fourteen years earlier.

The real cave is closed to protect the art. Visitors' breath had already damaged the paintings by the 1970s, and after green mould appeared in 2002 public access ended; since then only a tiny experimental programme, about five people a week, has been allowed inside. What visitors see is the Neocave, a precise replica of the main hall and its ceiling completed in 2001, part of the National Museum and Research Centre of Altamira, about 500 m from the original. The museum's displays of Palaeolithic life and art make it worth a half day.

Getting there

The museum is about 2 km from the medieval village of Santillana del Mar. Buses from Santander to Santillana run a few times a day and take about 40 minutes, and there are hourly Alsa buses from Torrelavega, about 10 km away; the museum is about 2 km west of the village. Santander's Seve Ballesteros Airport (SDR) is about 25 km away.