The Writing on the Wall
'Small Word' The Carlow Nationalist, December 4 2009
I was eight, in a darkened bedroom and quietly drawing by torch-light the figure of an animal on the clean white wall. Suddenly, the lights came on and my experiment with cave-art came to a swift conclusion. Dropping the tools of my trade I desperately tried to explain then pointed dumbly to the picture of a charging bison in the open pages of a magazine by my side; my mother was having none of it.
She was not familiar with the legendary Caves of Altamira with their magnificent and ancient wall paintings, or if she was, now was not the time to discuss their artistic merits. I felt hard done by as I scrubbed my efforts from the wall and wondered if some youth in Altamira had suffered the same tribulations for his art, a very long time ago.
Almost forty years later I stepped out of the bright Spanish sunshine and into another darkened room where I saw that very same bison which had charged from the pages of my childhood. Altamira has been on my ‘must see’ list for as long as I can remember, and so, one mid-September morning I arrived in the Cantabrian city of Santander, my final staging point for Altamira.
Santander, embracing a wide crescent-shaped bay, arrives as a welcome surprise. A Spanish holiday resort left over from a belle époque when royalty took the sea air and nobility strolled the beaches of El Sardinero. Balconied and brilliant white hotels line the promenade and flags flutter in the breeze from the dome of its Casino.
One street back from the sea the classical charm of the old world Hostal Paris offered a calm refuge. Its rooms have high spacious ceilings and were dressed tastefully with antique cane furniture accentuating their lightness. An elderly countess sitting with her embroidery and chaperoning a fair-skinned debutant in the downstairs drawing room would not have seemed at all out of place.
Once refreshed hunger drew me towards the old city and its narrow back-streets where I was spoiled for choice. Tapas bars were everywhere. Jamon Iberico cut with the precision of a surgeon, anchovies, seafood salads and tiny rounds of black pudding topped with even tinier fried quail eggs were washed down with brimming glasses of rich local wines. One could easily spend an evening hopping from tapas bar to tapas bar, sampling the inventiveness of their chefs. But alas, this was not my purpose and duty called.
Altamira stands on a hillside in rural Cantabria 30km West of Santander. To the North the land slopes easily past the butter-coloured stone houses and museums of Santillana del Mar – described by Jean Paul Sartre as “the most beautiful village in Spain”, – over rolling countryside where buff-coloured cattle graze on fragrant grasses, their bells tinkling in the breeze and on towards the long sandy beaches of Comillas. To the South the landscape gathers momentum culminating in the mountains of the Reserva Nacional de Saja and further again to the towering peaks of Los Picos de Europa; a nature lover’s paradise whose skies are filled with birds of prey and its forests run with wildlife.
In 1879 one Marcelino Salz de Sautuola, a learned man with an inquisitive mind who lived close to Altamira, was exploring a cave with his young daughter when she uttered the famous words “Mira papa, bueyes!”, “look father, oxen!” And so it was that the Caves of Altamira had been rediscovered having gone unseen for millennia. Sautuola published his findings but was scoffed at by his peers. In 1888, dejected by disbelief, he died a broken man. It wasn’t until the discovery of a group of caves in France’s Dordogne some years later, containing similar paintings to those found by Sautuola, was his discovery given credence and a public apology made posthumously.
Now where I stood on the site of his discovery there is an institution dedicated to the study and conservation of one of the world’s greatest treasures. Scientists from around the globe pore over the paintings of bison, stag, horses, wild pig and cryptic designs which have puzzled their armies of researchers. Including Altamira, Cantabria is home to over 50 such sites featuring cave art, one of the densest concentrations in the whole world.
Indeed the caves may have a greater significance for an Irish visitor than mere aesthetics alone. In an RTE television documentary, 'Blood of the Irish', through DNA research an interesting idea is presented. The idea being that the caves at Altamira and similar caves along the Northern Spanish coastline were the refuge of several small pockets of humanity during the last ice-age. The paintings are clear evidence that early man once thrived here and as the ice fields retreated the inhabitants may have used the area as a launch pad for their later migration northward, arriving eventually in Ireland. This raises a tantalising question; is it possible that the artists who once lived and raised families in these caves are really our Irish ancestors?
To preserve the cave’s paintings from literally being erased by the breaths of its visitors an exact replica, down to the cracks and fissures of the rock, has been painstakingly recreated. The building which houses this modern miracle – the Neo Cave – slinks on the horizon and barely creates a blemish on the landscape. Here, visitors can stand and wonder at the lives of those who created such masterpieces, they can explore their culture, beliefs, tools and weapons, their lives and deaths. The animals they relied upon for food and warmth. The music they made. Their social groupings. Even the ongoing work of the forensic anthropologists who investigate the site is available to all.
There are workshops for children and adults, exploring the everyday activities of the cave dwellers; hunting skills, fire making, prehistoric rhythms, the manufacture of clothing and most of all, how the paintings were created so lovingly and so long ago.
But Altamira is not a stuffy place of learning and academics, at least it wasn’t for me, it is also a place of inspiration and amazement, it is the home of true artistic process, “art for art’s sake”. As Picasso allegedly said, “...after Altamira everything else is just frivolity”. And as I looked at those paintings suspended in time I believe I understood just what he meant.