Cave of Altamira

The cave complex near Santillana del Mar in Cantabria runs some 270 metres through twisting passages and chambers formed by collapses in the calcareous rock of Mount Vispieres. Archaeological excavation of the cave floor found rich deposits of artefacts from the Upper Solutrean, around 18,500 years ago, and the Lower Magdalenian, between about 16,590 and 14,000 years ago; in the two millennia between those two occupations the cave was evidently inhabited only by wild animals. Human occupation was limited to the cave mouth, although paintings were created along its whole length, and those living there were well placed to take advantage of the wildlife grazing the valleys of the surrounding mountains as well as the marine life of nearby coastal areas.

The artists worked in charcoal and in ochre or hematite, diluting the pigments to vary their intensity. The Polychrome Ceiling depicts a herd of extinct steppe bison in different poses, two horses, a large doe and possibly a wild boar, while the Solutrean paintings include horses, goats and handprints made when an artist placed a hand on the wall and blew pigment over it. Around 13,000 years ago a rockfall sealed the entrance, preserving the contents until the cave was found again, which happened after a nearby tree fell and disturbed the fallen rocks.

The site was discovered in 1868 by Modesto Cubillas, a local tiler. A decade later, in 1879, the amateur archaeologist Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola was led to the cave by his eight-year-old daughter María and realised that the markings on the walls were drawings. Sautuola excavated it with Juan Vilanova y Piera, an archaeologist from the University of Madrid, and in 1880 he published his research, with Vilanova's support, interpreting the paintings as Palaeolithic in origin, to initial public acclaim. These were the first European cave paintings for which a prehistoric origin was suggested and promoted.

The publication quickly led to a bitter public controversy among experts, some of whom rejected the prehistoric origin of the paintings on the grounds that prehistoric human beings lacked sufficient ability for abstract thought. Gabriel de Mortillet and Émile Cartailhac, leading the French specialists, were particularly adamant in rejecting the hypothesis, and the findings of Sautuola and Vilanova were loudly ridiculed at the 1880 Prehistorical Congress in Lisbon. Because of the high artistic quality of the paintings and their exceptional state of conservation, Sautuola was accused of forgery, being unable to explain why there were no soot marks on the walls and ceilings. A fellow countryman maintained that the paintings had been produced by a contemporary artist on Sautuola's orders. Sautuola later found that the artist could have used marrow fat as oil for the lamp, which produces much less soot than any other combustibles.

Not until 1902 did the scientific society retract its opposition to the two Spaniards, by which time several other findings of prehistoric paintings in the Franco-Cantabrian region had rendered the hypothesis of the extreme antiquity of the Altamira paintings less offensive and the evidence could no longer be rejected. That year Cartailhac emphatically admitted his mistake in the article "Mea culpa d'un sceptique", published in the journal L'Anthropologie. Sautuola, having died fourteen years earlier, did not live to witness his rehabilitation.

Cartailhac went on to write a pair of books about the cave, assisted by hand-drawn reproductions of the paintings by Henri Breuil, a Catholic priest and competent draughtsman whose connection with the cave is discussed in the first chapter of G. K. Chesterton's The Everlasting Man. Further excavation work was carried out by Hermilio Alcalde del Río between 1902 and 1904, by the German Hugo Obermaier between 1924 and 1925, and finally by Joaquín González Echegaray in 1968. The age of the art is still unsettled: there is no scientific agreement on the dating of the artefacts found in the cave, nor of the drawings and paintings, and the question continues to be evaluated.

In 2008, researchers using uranium-thorium dating found that the paintings had been completed over a period of up to 20,000 years rather than during a comparatively brief one. A later study published in 2012, drawing on further uranium-thorium research, dated the oldest sign found, a large red claviform-like symbol of the Techo de los Polícromos, to 36.16±0.61 ka, still well within the Aurignacian, and a red dotted outline horse in the same chamber to 22.11±0.13 ka at the beginning of the Solutrean, establishing that the paintings span a period of more than 10,000 years.

During the 1970s and 2000s the paintings were being damaged by the carbon dioxide and water vapour in the breath of the large number of visitors. Altamira was completely closed to the public in 1977 and reopened to limited access in 1982, with very few visitors allowed in per day and a resulting three-year waiting list. After green mould began to appear on some paintings in 2002, the cave was closed to public access. There were plans during 2010 to reopen it towards the end of that year, but in December 2010 the Spanish Ministry of Culture decided that it would remain closed, on the advice of a group of experts who had found that conservation conditions inside the cave had become much more stable since the closure.

A replica cave and museum were built nearby and completed in 2001 by Manuel Franquelo and Sven Nebel, reproducing the cave and its art, including some sculptures of human faces that cannot be visited in the cave itself. Besides the adjacent National Museum and Research Center of Altamira, there are reproductions in the National Archaeological Museum of Spain in Madrid, in the Deutsches Museum in Munich, completed in 1964, and in Japan, completed in 1993.

Altamira was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1985 as a key location of the Cave of Altamira and Paleolithic Cave Art of Northern Spain, of which it is now inscribed as part, and it is protected as a bien de interés cultural. In 2007 it was selected as one of the 12 Treasures of Spain in a contest run by the broadcasters Antena 3 and COPE, and the logo the autonomous government of Cantabria uses to promote tourism to the region is based on one of the cave's bison. In 2016 the British director Hugh Hudson released a film about the discovery, Altamira, starring Antonio Banderas.