Caves, Altamira
From It Happened. Make of It What You Will.
Before the trip, I did the sensible thing. I asked my Spanish friends what I absolutely had to see.
They sent me lists and messages, whole paragraphs of suggestions. I built a map full of coloured pins – stars for “must see”, hearts for “if you have time”, other symbols for beaches, towns, food. The whole of Spain and Portugal turned into a candy-coloured strategy board.
Reality, of course, had its own ideas. Half of the pins I never reached. In between them, places appeared that had never been planned.
Altamira was one of those.
I was somewhere up north, between one coastal stop and the next, the car already in that road-trip autopilot: drive, park, sleep, repeat. The map on my phone showed a blue line hugging the coast; my own map of pins was waiting for the next planned stop.
Then I saw a brown tourist sign: Cueva de Altamira.
That was it. No dramatic music. Just one road sign, one name I vaguely remembered from school.
I looked at the clock, at the fuel, at the blue line on the screen.
Then I turned off the main road.
A few kilometres later I rolled into the car park: clean paths, neat signs, nothing mystical – just another “attraction” with a ticket booth. Five euros for entrance, a time slot printed on a small piece of paper. I waited for my group like anywhere else: random people in jackets, backpacks, someone scrolling on their phone.
I expected… I’m not sure what I expected. A museum. Information boards.
Maybe a dark tunnel with a guide and some polite lighting.
Instead, I walked into a room and my throat just closed.
On the ceiling above me, fifteen, sixteen thousand years ago, somebody had painted animals. Massive bison, horses, shapes moving along the rock as if the stone itself was breathing. Reds and blacks following every curve of the cave, using the bumps and cracks as muscle and bone.
I knew, intellectually, that this was a reproduction, carefully protected, the real cave closed to keep it alive. That should have made it feel less direct. It didn’t.
They showed how it was done: a hollow bone or reed, pigment in a small bowl, a hand pressed against the stone. Paint blown around the fingers, leaving a ghostly negative – pale rock where the hand had been, colour everywhere else. Airbrush technique, thousands of years before compressors and hoses.
Someone stood there in that cold, damp dark and thought: this is how I will leave a mark.
I have been in museums. I’ve seen paintings people queue hours for.
Usually, I look, I analyse, I nod: good composition, nice colour, clever concept.
My brain works. My body stays quiet.
Here, it was the opposite.
My brain had nothing useful to say. My body reacted first.
I stood there and cried. Quietly. Not from sadness, not from any clear thought, just from the shock of feeling how thin the distance was between “them” and “me”.
We like to talk about “prehistoric people”, “early humans”, as if they were prototypes – rough versions, slowly upgraded into us. We use words like “primitive art”, “beginnings of representation”.
Standing under that ceiling, there was no “primitive” anywhere.
There was just art.
Fully formed.
Confident.
Someone who saw the world, felt something about it, and refused to leave the stone empty.
Later, outside, the car park looked almost stupid in its normality. Asphalt, painted lines, a few trees, people checking their phones, kids arguing about snacks. I sat in the car, holding the steering wheel, and tried to understand what had just happened.
Altamira wasn’t even on my map. None of my friends had pushed it as a “must see”. It appeared out of nowhere on a brown sign, in between all the carefully pinned plans.
When people asked me afterwards what I liked most on that whole trip around the peninsula, I couldn’t answer. There were cliffs, cities, beaches, roads that tried to kill me, waterfalls I never actually reached.
But one place stayed.
A cave I hadn’t planned to visit.
This is one selected scene from the book.