Altamira, Cantabria: 150 years since world's first cave art discovery
Monday, October 8, 2018 @ 2:15 PM
A DOG, a weaver, an eight-year-old girl and a landowner with a spade formed the cast.
The opening line was: “Look, daddy! Oxen!”
And the setting: a communal home, uninhabited and forgotten for over 13,000 years.
Cantabria, on Spain's blustery northern coast, was sitting on a future UNESCO heritage site that, half a century on, would start to accumulate queues of camera-clicking tourists from every continent.
If María Sanz de Sautuola y Escalante could have lived to the age of 148, she would have seen her oxen (which was actually a bison) in motion for the first time a week ago on Tuesday, galloping across the Google 'doodle of the day', to mark the anniversary of the discovery of the Altamira Caves, on September 25, 1868 – although, in practice, it is she who should take the credit for being the first person in the world to see the first prehistoric cave paintings on earth ever uncovered in the Anno Domini era.
Because when Modesto Cubillas, a weaver from Cantabria's western neighbour, Asturias, first clambered into an unremarkable hole in the ground to free his trapped dog, he just assumed it was yet another grotto in the hillside, of which there were hundreds near the coastal town of Santillana del Mar.
Read more at thinkSPAIN.com