Altamira Cave

A local man, Modesto Cubillas, found the cave around 1868. Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, who had a broad education in natural science and history, first went in with him in 1875 and noticed some lines he did not think were made by people. At the Universal Exhibition in Paris he saw prehistoric objects from caves in the south of France, decided to work in the caves of Cantabria himself, and in 1879 went back to Altamira with his daughter María. She was the first to see the figures on the ceiling. In 1880 Sautuola published them in a pamphlet, Brief notes on some prehistoric objects in the Province of Santander, as Palaeolithic.

Almost nobody accepted it. The museum writes that evolutionists, creationists and the prehistorians of the day all met his claim with scepticism. One objection was light: as France’s Ministry of Culture records, many in the late nineteenth century thought people of that age could not have painted deep in a cave, far from daylight, with no lamp good enough to work by. The answer came from France. Painted caves were found at La Mouthe, Combarelles and Font-de-Gaume, and in La Mouthe Émile Rivière found a sandstone lamp with a sooty deposit in its hollow, the first Palaeolithic lamp recognised as such. In 1902 the French prehistorian Émile de Cartailhac published his “Mea culpa d’un sceptique”, and Altamira became the emblem of Ice Age art, a quarter of a century late.

Fame nearly ruined it. Hundreds of thousands of visitors, with the walls, roads and lighting built for them, upset the cave’s microclimate, and it was closed in 1979. It reopened in 1982 for 8,500 people a year and closed again in 2002. After a research programme from 2012 to 2014, the museum’s board agreed in 2015 to a strict regime: five people a week, on a visit of 37 minutes, dressed and lit to a set protocol.