Cave of Altamira
The painted cave where Palaeolithic art was first recognised, now visited through the Neocueva replica outside Santillana del Mar
Essential info
Visit details
Overview
The Cave of Altamira is a limestone cave about 270 metres long, 2 km outside Santillana del Mar in Cantabria, and the first place in the world where Upper Palaeolithic rock art was identified as genuinely prehistoric. The cave itself has been closed to ordinary visitors since 2002 on conservation grounds, so what you actually visit is the Museo Nacional y Centro de Investigación de Altamira next door, built around a full-scale reconstruction of the painted chamber called the Neocueva.
Bison, horses, deer, hands and abstract signs were painted and engraved here across the millennia the cave was occupied, between roughly 36,000 and 13,000 years ago. They are spread along more than 290 metres of the cave, but the great concentration is in the Sala de Polícromos, the polychrome hall. The largest figures are horses and bison between 125 and 170 cm long, plus a hind of more than two metres.
The method is consistent enough that you can read it off the wall. The outline was engraved first, then drawn as a black line in charcoal, then filled with red or yellowish paint. On some bison the change of colour along the belly was marked in black paint, and a charcoal pencil was used to pick out the hair and the hump. Engraving does the fine work: eyes, horns, the hair of the neck. The main passage runs between two and six metres high, so the painted ceiling is close over your head rather than distant.
UNESCO added Altamira to the World Heritage List in 1985 on two grounds: the aesthetic quality of the art as a unique achievement of Magdalenian culture, and its value as evidence of that culture in southern Europe. In 2008 the inscription was widened to take in seventeen more painted caves across Asturias, Cantabria and the Basque Country, and renamed to cover Palaeolithic cave art in northern Spain as a whole, eighteen sites in total. Set your expectations accordingly: this is a state museum visit with a very good replica at the end of it, not a caving trip.
History
The archaeological deposit in the cave vestibule is stacked in eight levels, and the radiocarbon dates run deep. Levels one to five are Magdalenian, between about 19,000 and 16,800 years before the present. The two Solutrean levels below them fall between 24,000 and 20,500, and the oldest level reached, the eighth, is late Gravettian at 26,400 to 26,000 years.
Radiocarbon works on the Magdalenian figures because they were drawn with charcoal, which is organic. The older figures are engraved or painted in red pigment with no organic content, so they resisted dating for decades and had to be placed by style instead. Uranium-series dating, long used on calcite crusts and needing only a few milligrams of sample, changed that. A red painted sign in the middle of the Sala de Polícromos came back at 35,600 years before the present, which puts it in the Aurignacian, a period from which the excavation of the cave floor has produced no remains at all.
The art survived by accident. Rockfalls shaped the cave and are slowly collapsing it, but the one that came down about 13,000 years ago destroyed and plugged the entrance, and the sealed interior then held a very stable climate for the next thirteen millennia.
A local man, Modesto Cubillas, found the reopened cavity around 1868. Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola first went in with him in 1875 and noticed some lines he did not then take for human work. After seeing prehistoric objects from caves in southern France at the Paris Universal Exposition, Sautuola went back to Altamira in 1879 with his daughter María, and it was the child who first saw the figures on the ceiling. He published the find in 1880 in a pamphlet, Breves apuntes sobre algunos objetos prehistóricos de la Provincia de Santander, arguing that the paintings were Palaeolithic.
Nobody believed him. Evolutionists, creationists and the professional prehistorians of the day all rejected the claim, and recognition only came once painted caves turned up in France, above all Le Mouthe, Combarelles and Font de Gaume.
Management of the site began with an administrative board set up in 1924, and the first building here was a traditional Cantabrian house that stored the excavated objects and housed the site’s first warden. Visitor numbers climbed through the middle of the century, three reception pavilions went up in the 1970s, and in 1979 the Ministry of Culture created the Museo Nacional y Centro de Investigación de Altamira to run and conserve the cave properly.
By then the damage was under way. Hundreds of thousands of visitors, plus the walls, paths and electrical installations built to accommodate them, swung the cave’s temperature and humidity around and destabilised the microclimate. Altamira closed in 1977. It reopened in 1982 under a restricted regime of 8,500 people a year.
Between 1997 and 2001 the response widened to the land around the cave. The museum bought up plots in the cave’s zone of influence, closed rural tracks, removed nearby livestock buildings and diverted both the road and the museum access, all to stop pollutants reaching the interior through infiltrating water or the air. The cave was closed again in 2002 as a preventive conservation measure. A research programme between 2012 and 2014 then measured what human presence actually does to the paintings, and in March 2015 the museum’s board settled on the strict regime that still applies.
The present building, the one you walk into, opened in 2001 to a design by the architect Juan Navarro Baldeweg, sited and shaped above all to protect the cave underneath. Research has not stopped either: in February 2025 the museum announced a fresh set of engravings and paintings identified inside the original cave.
Visiting
From November to April the museum opens Tuesday to Saturday 09:30 to 18:00 and Sundays and public holidays 09:30 to 15:00. From May to October the Tuesday to Saturday closing moves to 20:00, while Sundays and holidays stay on 15:00. It is closed every Monday of the year, and on 1 and 6 January, 1 May, 16 September and 24, 25 and 31 December. The ticket office shuts 30 minutes before the museum.
General admission is 3 euros and the reduced rate is 1.50 euros. Entry is free for everyone on Saturdays from 14:00 and all day Sunday, and also on 18 April, 12 October and 6 December. With documentation it is free for under-18s and over-65s, students aged 18 to 25, carnet joven holders, people with a disability, the registered unemployed, pensioners, large families, teachers and working tourist guides. An annual card for the museum costs 25 euros.
How tickets actually work
Same-day tickets go on sale at the box office from 09:30 in order of arrival. Advance tickets are sold online through the Banco Santander platform and must be bought at least one day before your visit, never on the day itself; they are valid only for the date and time printed, you need to be there fifteen minutes early or forfeit entry, and there are no changes or refunds. Free tickets have to be validated at the box office against the relevant document. Everyone needs a ticket, children included.
The permanent exhibition
The permanent display is called “Los tiempos de Altamira” and runs in two parts: galleries on the art and culture of Upper Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers, then the Neocueva itself. The galleries move through Sautuola and the discovery, the methods of prehistoric archaeology, the Pleistocene landscape and animals that preceded the paintings, daily life in the period, and finally the art, including portable pieces and contemporary works made in response to Altamira.
The Neocueva
The Neocueva presents Altamira as it was between 35,000 and 13,000 years ago, as a three-dimensional reproduction built from the scientific record and from study of the techniques and materials prehistoric people used. The reconstruction starts in the wide vestibule, the part of the cave where people actually lived, littered with animal bone, shells, charcoal and tools of flint, antler and bone, along with pigment residues and portable art.
The division of the cave is the point the reconstruction makes best. The vestibule, which had daylight, was where the everyday work happened. The spaces where light barely reached were given over to symbolic expression, and that is where the polychrome ceiling sits, with its bison, horses, deer, goats and painted and engraved signs. Download the museum’s free app before you arrive if you want a guided route through the Neocueva; it doubles as the audio guide.
What you cannot do
You cannot get into the original cave. Access is capped by the museum’s board at five people a week, 260 a year, allocated from a waiting list that was drawn up in 2002, reactivated in 2020 and ratified in 2023. That list is currently closed and no new applications are being taken. If you want to walk through a real painted cave in Cantabria, El Castillo at Puente Viesgo is open to the public and shares the World Heritage listing.
Facilities and access
Parking inside the grounds is free and guarded, with room for 200 cars, ten coaches and bicycles, and it opens at 09:30. There is a restaurant and cafeteria, a bookshop that keeps museum hours, a first aid room, a free staffed cloakroom with self-service lockers, and green areas outside with vending machines and somewhere to sit. Food and drink are not allowed inside the museum, and large bags and umbrellas have to go in the lockers.
The building has no architectural barriers, with ramps and lifts between levels, reserved parking bays, adapted toilets and a wheelchair available on loan. Induction loops are fitted at the ticket desks, at information, at the audiovisual before the Neocueva and in the auditorium, and audio guides with audio description can be borrowed or downloaded.
Tips
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Guided Neocueva tours in Spanish Sign Language run on the second Saturday of each month for groups of more than five, free on production of a document, booked at least fifteen days ahead through reservas.maltamira@cultura.gob.es.
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Sunday and Saturday afternoon are free, which also makes them the busiest slots, and those tickets exist only at the box office on the day. If you would rather have a fixed time than save 3 euros, buy online the day before instead.
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Sunday and holiday closing is 15:00 all year, even in August when the museum runs to 20:00 on other days, and the ticket desk stops half an hour before that. A Sunday afternoon arrival is a wasted trip.
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The museum opens on some holidays that catch people out, including 2 and 3 April, 28 July, 15 August and 8 December, and closes on 16 September, which is not an obvious date.
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Photography is allowed throughout the museum, but not with flash, a tripod or a selfie stick.
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Coming by long-distance train earns you half off. Renfe passengers get the 50% reduction on presentation of a long-distance ticket within 48 hours of travelling.
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Groups of more than eight from cultural or educational bodies also get the reduced 1.50 euro rate, but only if the visit is requested at least fifteen days in advance.
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Without a car, the nearest rail options are the Renfe station at Tanos-Torrelavega, 9 km away, and the narrow-gauge FEVE station at Puente de San Miguel, 6 km away. Buses run to Santillana del Mar with ALSA from Torrelavega and with La Cantábrica from both Torrelavega and Santander, leaving the last 2 km to cover on foot or by taxi.
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Driving from elsewhere in Asturias and Cantabria or the Basque Country, take the A-8 and leave at exit 234 for Santillana del Mar; from Castilla y León it is the A-67. The museum is signposted from the motorway and from both Puente San Miguel and Santillana del Mar.
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Eat before or after rather than on site. Nothing may be consumed inside the museum, so the cafeteria and the outdoor rest areas with vending machines are the only options within the grounds.
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