Caves of Nerja

Five boys from Maro went out after bats on 12 January 1959, squeezed through a sinkhole called La Mina, and found human skeletons and pottery in the first chamber. What they had walked into is now understood to be one of Europe’s most important prehistoric sites — and the subject of a dating controversy that, if it resolves one way, would rewrite who made the first art.

What the boys found

José Luis Barbero, Manuel Muñoz, Miguel Muñoz, Francisco Navas and José Torres chipped away rock and stalagmites blocking the opening and descended into a huge chamber — the Sala de la Cascada, now used as a concert hall. Word spread fast; scientists, photographers and sightseers followed. A tourist entrance was cut and the cave opened to the public on 12 June 1960. The system runs to roughly 4,823 mapped metres with a vertical range of seventy metres, formed when water penetrated and dissolved marble around five million years ago.

The seal paintings

In February 2012 came the announcement that changed how the cave is discussed. Charcoal recovered beside six paintings of seals was radiocarbon dated to between roughly 42,300 and 43,500 years old — older than the Chauvet paintings in France, which had held the record. Professor José Luis Sanchidrián of the University of Córdoba called the result an academic bombshell. His reasoning for attributing them to Neanderthals rather than modern humans is circumstantial but not trivial: the images lack the parallelism typical of Palaeolithic human art, Neanderthals ate seals, and there is little evidence of modern humans in this part of Iberia at that date. He has been careful to say the alternative is possible, only more hypothetical. The crucial caveat is that the pigments themselves have never been dated — only the charcoal lying near them — and funding for that work has repeatedly stalled. Treat the “oldest art in the world” claim as unresolved rather than established.

What you actually see

Only about a quarter of the cave’s surface is open. Nerja I holds the Show Galleries, roughly 700 metres of level concrete pathway with handrails. Nerja II — the Upper Gallery found in 1960 and the New Gallery found in 1969, where nearly all the recent discoveries have been made — is closed to general visitors, though small speleological study groups can arrange access. The scale inside is the point: a thirty-two-metre column in the Cataclysm Hall, fluted formations in the Organ Corner that ring when struck, and the Ballet Hall with a stage and auditorium used for the summer music and dance festival.

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