Altamira Cave Art in Spain Is Being ‘Cloned’ for Visitors

Five visitors stand in the bright daylight outside the extraordinary cave. A guide switches off the yellow floor lights and slams the heavy metal door, sealing the entrance for another day.

It is rid of body heat and contaminating breath. Pitch black. Cool. The only sound is water dripping from stalactites. The cave is at rest again, just as it was for 14,000 years until a hunter stumbled upon the entrance 132 years ago.

Safely sealed in the dark is the Sistine Chapel of the Paleolithic Age: 21 magnificently painted bison outlined and shaded in black, red bodies engraved in the glistening, creamy limestone. They crouch, lie down, shake their manes, charge across the ceiling, heads turned, tails flying, drilled eyes dark as coal.

Mingling with the bison are a giant red deer measuring more than 8 feet from nose to tail, a wild boar, black goats, human bodies with animal-like heads, and red-slashed abstract designs of yet undeciphered meaning.

The cave was discovered in 1868, but it was another 11 years before the cave was explored by Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, a nearby landowner who was fascinated by the new science of archeology.

On his second visit, Sautuola sifted floor debris for fossils and flints while his 8-year-old daughter, Maria, entered a chamber just off the main entrance. Following the dim light of her carbide lantern, she glanced up.

“Papa, bueyes! (Daddy, oxen!),” she cried.

Sautuola joined the child, crouching under the low ceiling just like the original artist, who could only get a panoramic view of the bison by lying on his back.

Sautuola, and eventually the world, was dumbfounded at what he saw. It took scientists 20 years to accept the truth of the paintings: that primitive man had a brain capable of sophisticated artistic expression.

You can feel something of Sautuola’s thrill when visiting the cave, which in the summer months restricts admission to two groups of five visitors daily.

The small group’s allotted 10 minutes in the bison room follows a short tour of other chambers of the cave, which is 295 yards deep, the length of three football fields.

You enter the same opening discovered accidentally by the hunter and immediately see an ancient excavated hearth and a massive rock pile from a fallen ceiling. The guide points out stone walls built in modern times to keep the ceiling, beaded with water in places, from collapsing. Dim floor lighting stretches along the packed clay pathway.

Deeper in the cave, the guide points his flashlight at the group’s first contact with the ancient artists: a deer engraved on the wall. Scholars believe these engravings could be older than the paintings, perhaps dating back 18,000 years, when humans took over the cave from the bears.

Deeper still, dark passageways branch off toward hidden vaults, reminiscent of the dim, barred side chapels in Spanish cathedrals.

The cave is cool, humid, very pleasant. Temperatures naturally hover around 57 degrees Fahrenheit, according to the guide.

Steep stairs lead to a large chamber where a huge stalactite flows from a far wall like a frozen waterfall or altar.

“Man’s first cathedral,” one visitor whispers.

Scientists divide the cave into 10 sections. All contain drawings, some off the tourist route so dangerously narrow there is room for only one person at a time to squeeze close enough to see them.

The guide circles back toward the entrance and turns right through a corridor leading to the low ceiling of the bison, known as the Polychrome Chamber.

It is extraordinary artwork. The colors are bright, the reds shining with dampness, as if still wet from being painted yesterday. The paintings are sharp--nothing like the dull, 30-year-old replica at the National Archeological Museum in Madrid.

Bison dominate the room. Ranging from 5 to 10 feet across, they are sharply outlined in charcoal and painted with a mixture of ocher (iron oxide) and water. One bison’s eye seems to stare directly into yours.

The limestone ceiling is a 1,744-square-foot canvas, nearly every inch covered with drawings. Some bison protrude from the ceiling, their bodies wrapped in relief around natural rock bulges.

The visitors stand transfixed, barely listening to the guide as their eyes sweep across the rest of the ceiling to the dim far corners where scientists, allowed much closer access, have found drawings of what appear to be mysterious graphic designs and humans with animal-like heads.

Suddenly something unexpected is spotted: the red print of a human hand on the ceiling, as dramatic as finding a Goya signature on a painting in some dark attic. It is a hand reaching across 14,000 years from an artist with a brain as modern as ours.

“What we discover in Altamira is our own infancy; we find ourselves,” wrote French paleontologist and philosopher Teilhard de Chardin, because the art reflects “the same basic aspirations that spring from the bottom of our souls.”

Chardin is quoted in a guidebook written by Miguel Angel Garcia Guinea, director of the Sautuola Institute of Archeology in nearby Santander.

“The scientific value of this discovery is self-evident. It bridged the gap between us and that unknown mentality of Western man and the culture of his time,” Garcia Guinea says.

Jose A. Lasheras, who as director of the Altamira Museum and Investigation Center administers the cave, says the paintings are masterpieces not only of prehistoric art, but of art itself.

“Their sheer artistic quality was to be the reason why their discovery would arouse such great confusion and mistrust,” he wrote in an article published in a guidebook.

Spanish artists and professors Matilde Muzquiz Perez-Seoane and her husband, Pedro A. Saura Ramos, who painted the replica, are convinced by close examination of the originals and their own experience in imitating the style that a single artist painted all the bison.

The cave originally attracted hordes of visitors, 177,000 in 1973 alone. To ensure its conservation, it was closed to the public for five years, reopening in 1982 to 8,500 people a year. There is a three-year waiting list.

To make the experience available to a wider public while simultaneously attracting tourist dollars to the northern province of Cantabria, Lasheras is overseeing the construction of a museum featuring a virtual cave, which will use the latest computerized digital transfer technology. The replica of the cave and the renowned Ceiling of the Polychromes will accommodate hundreds of thousands of visitors a year.

Originally budgeted at $14 million, the project got underway three years ago and is expected to be completed next year. The replica, known as the “neocave,” may open before the rest of the museum, perhaps late this fall.

Unlike modern visitors, Sautuola, the 19th century amateur archeologist, had no idea what awaited him inside. Nothing like it was known to exist.

He became an advocate of the paintings’ message: that prehistoric humans were not simple brutes dedicated solely to survival hunting and gathering. Among them were artists with abstract conceptual capacity and great skill.

Sautuola spent the rest of his life trying to show the world’s leading archeologists the significance of the paintings. Most scoffed at his findings and did not acknowledge their legitimacy for another 20 years when similar caves were found in France. By that time he had died.

No one is certain why Paleolithic cave dwellers, who were Homo sapiens, painted the ceiling. But scientists are convinced that it was not done for fun or entertainment.

“They were, without a shadow of a doubt, manifestations of high symbolic value,” Lasheras says. “Cave art comes within the sphere of what we understand as mythical or pre-philosophical thought, bordering on or lying within the realm of religion.”

Similar cave art has been discovered at about 280 sites, all in Western Europe. The earliest examples date back 30,000 years.

Altamira was inhabited and painted at the close of the last Ice Age. Animals that no longer live there were abundant, including the bison.

Bears hibernated in the cave before humans moved in 18,500 years ago. Tools dating back 100,000 years have been found in the surrounding area that belonged to the genus Homo, but of a different species than the artists and us.

The museum will house a library and two large rooms, one for scientific conferences and traveling exhibitions and the other for a permanent exhibition of prehistoric objects from Spain’s northern Cantabrian region.

An 8,611-square-foot section of the cave is being constructed as it was 14,000 years ago. Artists employed the same materials and techniques as the original painters. The reproduction will include the vestibule inside the entrance--the cave dwellers’ living area--and the adjacent bison chamber. The ancient rock fall and modern reinforcements that blocked light from reaching the ceiling will be removed.

Visitors reach the mouth of the cave replica through a passageway containing educational images and texts. A holographic representation of a prehistoric family will suddenly appear around a fire on the ancient hearth. A ramp that passes by archeological digs and a prehistoric artist’s workshop will lead to the polychrome ceiling.

The reproduction is based on a digital model prepared by the National Geographic Institute. The “map” of the cave was transferred to molds. Cast in resin and crushed limestone, sections were pieced together in the museum like a giant jigsaw puzzle.

The neocave will contain every crack and indentation of the original. Other replicas exist, one in Germany and another in Japan, but they are smaller and not as precise.

Some scientists have advocated closing the original cave to the public when the virtual one opens. Lasheras and the Sautuola Institute’s Garcia Guinea are among the majority who oppose the idea.

“Altamira belongs to mankind, not just the scientists,” Garcia Guinea says. “To close the polychrome grotto to the general public would be like hanging photographs in the Prado and locking up the originals in the basement.”

The project is a year behind schedule, but Lasheras says he will not sacrifice the quality of the museum and cave to meet deadlines.

His colleague Carmen de las Heras put it this way:

“I recall reading that when Michelangelo was painting the Sistine Chapel, the pope grew impatient and shouted from below, ‘When will it be ready?’ and the great artist shouted back, ‘When it is finished.’ ”