June 2--Cantabrian Caves

I woke up feeling much better! My stomach was still sensitive, but I kept all my food down today and definitely had more energy than yesterday.  Yesterday didn't feel super productive in terms of time management, but today definitely felt better. Yesterday was just a LOT of time on the bus – like literally three or more hours,  - and it didn’t feel like we actually got a lot done. Plus I was kind of irritated because the town we stayed in last night was SO CUTE and I barely made it walking ten minutes to and from the grocery store cause I felt so crappy, so I missed out on this time to go and see this super cute and lively town and spent it instead sitting in my hotel room. 

Anyway, today we spent most of our time visiting these caves in the mountain ranges of Cantabria (the area that we are in right now). I have to admit, I love me a good cave, and these ones did not disappoint. Well, except in the fact that you can’t take PICTURES in the CAVE! Like… not even without flash, like you can’t take ANY pictures AT ALL. So here are a few highlights that we came across in the first cave, La Castilla. You know the handprints in the movie, Brother Bear? We SAW THOSE LIKE FOR REAL! Turns out, the way they would do it, is they would mix water and rust to create this red dye, and then they would take these super finely carved pieces of bone that were hollow, and blow the dye through these bones to create literal prehistoric spray-paint, and paint a negative of their hands on the wall. ISN’T THAT SO COOL?! AND WE LIKE SAW THEIR HAND PRINTS! 

Apparently, ancient people kind of congregated in the same caves over thousands of years, so in the same spots where the hands were, there were even OLDER rust/dye dots and designs from  40,000 years ago (if I’m remembering correctly). And the way they know that is because there is a stalactite that has formed over one of these dots, and it has been carbon dated to be THAT old. I don’t know why, but that was just really striking to me, that literally these people TENS OF THOUSANDS of years ago were making these marks. The hand prints were made closer to 12,000 years ago, but the sweet thing is, now a days you can only see maybe 8-9 hand prints, but you know they’ve scanned the wall with all that science stuff, and there are 42 hands prints that were painted onto that wall. And it isn’t just adult hands. There are baby hands, big hands, thin hands, left hands, right hands, and they speculate that a clan had recently come to the area, and they were leaving their mark on the wall. Isn’t that so sweet, to think that these parents held their little babies and children up to the ceiling so they could ALL get their handprints on the ceiling? That they commemorated that unity and togetherness in a way that is still visible thousands of years later? I don’t know, sometimes I think we imagine these ancient people so different from what we are now, and yes, they had a lower life-expectancy, and they were wearing different things, and they had a different life-style, but so much of what was most important to them is the exact same as to us. Family, love, spirituality.  The deeper we went into these caves, the more it was obvious that it was for spiritual purposes since with no sunlight and not much warmth, what do the caves provide other than a sacred and special place? These drawings were something deeper, something beautiful, something sacred. And honestly, they are beautiful. The handprints are such a simple but powerful communication of spiritual connection, or eternity, of touching LITERALLY something more than yourself. I just love it.

Anyway, I didn’t mean to get that deep, but it is really striking to see that so long ago, like an incomprehensible length of time in the past, these people were just trying to connect with something bigger than themselves and trying to create beauty. Plus, in this same cave, there was another sculpture that showed this buffalo standing on its hind legs with front legs outstretched, and although it could just be a buffalo, the stalagmite it was painted on also was carved at the top, and when a light is shown onto the carved stalagmite, the shadow of the rock in the dark lighting of the cave turns into a buffalo, that with small movements from the light runs and dances on the cave wall behind it. Isn’t that CRAZY COOL?! 

And one more cool thing from this cave. So there is this line of like 137 dots or some crazy number like that, and in one section of this line, the dots group up into this sort of bunch, and in this bunch of dots is some very clear lines drawn using this rust dye. Although these are several theories of what the lines represent, our guide showed us how the lines can be easy outlined using the shadow of the hand in different shapes – specifically the left hand. Some scholars guess that these lines – tracing the left hand in different positions – were used during hunting, to communicate without sound. Because most people are right handed, they hold their spears in their right and signal with their left, explaining why the left hand works the best for modeling these shapes. Even if it isn’t true, it’s a SUPER cool theory. 

Since we couldn't take pictures INSIDE the cave, here are some from the surrounding area in between the caves (in the Cantabrian mountains):

The other cave was super cool but had fewer drawings, and the drawings it did have were much “newer” – the oldest being only around 10,000 years old :D One impression I did get from this cave was how much of a mess Spain was in the 1960-70s. Spain became super popular for tourism around the 60s-70s, and instead of preserving its natural resources, Spain kind of went overboard, making sure people could access everything it had to offer. So the second cave we saw, Las Monedas, had suffered because of that tourism craze. Obviously these are caves, and they’ve got some SERIOUS stalactite and stalagmite action going on. Well, to make the caves accessible, and to build walkways and stairs in this cave, sometimes the workers would just carve through a stalagmite, or crack off a couple of stalactites. And honestly, looking around, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the early tourists just cracked a little piece off here and there for a souvenir. And in the room that had the most preserved drawings, one of the drawings had obviously been worn away pretty badly, most likely from tourists simply rubbing up against it. Most of the drawings in Las Monedas were just charcoal, meaning any rubbing or continuous touching is just going to make the drawing disappear. 

There is a cool story behind the name of this cave – Las Monedas. Moneda is the word for coin in Spanish, and back when they were excavating the cave, they went exploring into this pretty narrow hole that has a small room  30 meters down. They found at the bottom of this cave, a bag, and in that bag, a sack of 25 coins from around the 16^th century. The cool part though? Although there were footprints also preserved at the bottom of the shaft, there were no bones, meaning someone get down there – probably with a simple rope - deposited the coins, and left. Where did they go?! Like just the whole story that could be discovered from that bag of coins is so fascinating. Also, one more kind of cool, kind of sad thing about this cave. So all over the cave, they found all these bear bones, some even so old that they had melded to the rocks as they were pushed by river water that ran through the caves. Turns out, they are from ancient mega-fauna bears that hibernated in these caves. But who else wanted the caves? Yup, HUMANS. So, most likely while the bears hibernated, they started killing them so that they could use the caves. And these bears ended up being the first human-caused extinction as they were systematically killed in these caves. We have lots of bones, but the heads that might have remained in the caves were taken by more modern inhabitants of the lands, and honestly, if you found a GIANT cave bear skull, wouldn’t you take it to make a center piece in your home?

So, our tours ended, we exited the cool, damp caves and went to experience the full repercussions of overzealous tourism in Spain. One of the most amazing caves in the region and probably all of Europe, is called Altamira. It is a huge cave with innumerable, multicolor depictions of animals. It is known as the “prehistoric Sistine chapel” because all of the paintings are located on the ceiling of the cave. UNFORTUNATELY, after the drawings were visibly deteriorating, due to the active smoking, drinking and flash photography in the cave over several years in the 1960s, it was sealed to the public, and now, instead of the actual cave, they have created a reproduction of the cave and its contents for people to view. I mean it’s a great reproduction, but it ain’t no original. 

I would have been fine if we had ended the day there, but our teachers had also planned a beach trip to a shore only 6 km from our hotel. So, we hopped back on the bus, scooted over to the hotel to change, and then hopped back on the bus to go to the beach. In my opinion, and in the professional opinion of my Irish skin, it was the perfect amount of time at the beach. A quick hour and a half (some of which needed to be used to get dry, and make sure my feet were clean and sandless) to warm up, jump in the water, cool off, explore the beach and make sand castles :-) 

Then we hopped back on the bus – making sure we were SPOTLESS of sand first – and came back to the hotel. Although I would have preferred shorter bus times, it was a pretty amazing day :D