El Pendo Cave and Bilbao, April 29

This edition of Notes from the Underground features a visit to El Pendo cave.  It’s an out-of-the-way place with little associated infrastructure, and it seems all the more authentic given the lack of interpretive center and gift shop.

The entrance opens into the hills above the Pendo River, between fields patrolled by clusters of cows.  From the tiny parking lot, a path – liberally adorned with cow patties of all shapes, sizes, and consistencies – winds some 100 meters to the cave entrance.  The cows were utterly (udderly?) unperturbed by our presence; “been there dung that,” I guess.

El Pendo cave is essentially a subterranean auditorium:  an enormous chamber largely bereft of stalactites and stalagmites.  It was occupied for 150,000 years, first by Neanderthals and later by Sapiens.  Although the cave has been known in modern times for a century or so, the drawings – mostly deer, with some bison and horses – were not discovered until the 1990s because they were coated in millennia-thick dust.  More than in other caves, the drawings seem to narrate a story, perhaps of deer fleeing a hunter or migrating en masse. 

Our base for the next two nights is the modern Miro Hotel in Bilbao, the unofficial capital of Basque country.  After checking in, I headed across the street to the Museo Guggenheim Bilbao, designed by Frank Gehry.  

The museum is a striking building “guarded” by Jeff Koons’s “Puppy” (1992), an enormous stainless steel-framed dog covered in soil and flowering plants. Right now there’s a large Miro exhibition (not my thing) and very interesting exhibitions of work from Lynette Yiadom Boakye (a terrific contemporary British artist) and Oskar Kokoschka (a mid-20th century enfant terrible). I will say that after spending several days admiring the graceful, elegant cave art from thousands of years ago, the shift to modern expressionism was a bit hard to digest.