Bob:

Our main goal for the day was to visit the Altamira Cave site, so after our light breakfast of coffee, toast, crackers, and cake (rather high carbohydrate!) we walked roughly 3 kilometers out of town to get there. The sun was shining, the temperature was warm but not hot, and all together it was a great day for walking. Santillana del Mar is a quite small town, so we were out into the countryside already with the first kilometer, and the second two kilometers were basically uphill to the entrance of the cave. The Altamira Cave has been closed since 2001 to prevent or at least slow further damage to the cave drawings, but the Spanish government has built a full scale replication in a museum that we visited instead.

The museum consisted of basically two parts: the recreated cave entrance and chamber with all the prehistoric paintings, and an archeological museum about prehistoric man. We first watched a 10-minute movie about the history of the site and then were free to wander though the recreated cave chamber. Guided tours are given, of course, but only in Spanish so we took the "self-guided" option. First of all, we didn't think we'd get much from a lecture in Spanish, and secondly we preferred to take our sweet time reading the explanatory plaques because they all included an English version together with the Spanish.

Monika:

Bob:

The cave was a marvel of meticulous recreation of everything from the stalactites on the ceiling to (fake) water seeping down through the cracks and, of course, the prehistoric paintings. The paintings were all of animals and most were colored with red ochre, often outlined in black. The pictures of bison, deer, elk, and horses were very vibrant and lifelike, and it was fascinating to think of the prehistoric artists who had done them. The historical information clarified that there were two distinct prehistoric cultures, a more ice-age type of culture about 18,000 years ago and a second occupation at the end of the ice age about 13,000 years ago. I wished I could have asked one crucial question, and that was which culture had produced which paintings on the ceiling. I'm pretty certain that with the various dating methods available that could be determined for most of the paintings, and that information would help me understand the differences between the cultures. Since things like the stone and bone tools shifted between those two cultural periods, quite plausibly the nature of the artwork shifted also.

The exact significance of the paintings is also unclear. The museum section was very helpful about the facts of the matter as it brought together information from many such cave sites in Spain, France, and further afield. For instance, I had tacitly assumed the paintings were related to hunting goals or celebrations, but analysis of paintings from many such caves together with the remains of the meals actually consumed by the humans living in the caves showed no relationship whatsoever. Since many of the animals are pregnant, the paintings could represent fertility rituals of some kind, but that I think ranks as sheer speculation. The paintings certainly took time and effort to construct, however, and are still beautiful to the modern eye. Making art that communicates even at a basic level across millennia is, to me, a supreme achievement no matter what the original intent.

Monika:

Bob:

We picked up a small replica piece of a carved ivory head of a mountain goat or something similar in the museum shop, plus some other tourist knickknacks, and then we walked back down the hill into town. It was already past noon, so we stopped for lunch at a restaurant on the edge of town and had a very nice meal of potato salad plus ham and a baked half chicken plus French Fries. We were too full to even consider the dessert that came with the meal, and it cost each of us 9 Euro (plus 1.50 Euro for each Coke or beer).

The meal gave us the energy to continue walking around the old town of Santillana del Mar for some gifts. Frommer's had reported it as a good place to purchase ceramics, and we did find some nice pieces to go with the dish we had purchased previously. We located the shop with a nice porcelain cake platter and in another store we found a large, enameled tile that had "El Professor" on the bottom and the depiction of a medieval professor teaching a student on top. It was hand made and apparently modeled on a medieval era painting or ceramic. I had certainly never seen anything like it before, so I bought it despite the fact that the base of the tile was essentially a slab of brick so it was quite heavy and awkward to carry. Back at the hotel, I carefully packed it among the layers of clothes in my luggage and hoped it would survive the trip home. Such a sucker

The rest of the afternoon we read our books and rested, knowing that the next day we would have a rather long drive from the northern coast down to Madrid and possibly Toledo. I became caught up in finishing my book, but we still turned in shortly after ten. I had a scare, however, when I was repacking my toiletries and my electric shaver slipped out of my hand and dived into the hole in the cover of the bidet! I grabbed at it but missed, so it slithered down in there and I was forced to retrieve it, thinking dark thoughts about exactly what the French do in their bidets and why in the world there had to be a hole in the cover so you couldn't even safely use the thing as a table. If it had been a disposable razor I think I would have just left it for the maid to sort out later (I can hear her saying, "Crazy Americans!"), but I had spent $23 on a Norelco hair trimming kit that I didn't need just to get that razor as a "free" gift, so I bit the bullet (to thoroughly mix a metaphor) and groped down into the bidet to retrieve my errant shaver. Carefully washing it off (just in case!), I returned it to my toiletries bag and completed my repacking.

Monika: