A few of us went to Spain over our 3 day break. We visited northern Spain and stayed in a wonderful old hotel in Santillana Del Mar. This is the region of the famous painted cave site of Altamira (sorry, we have no photos of this because photography isn't allowed, even of the replica of the cave that people visit today). However, we did have a chance to visit the archaeological sites at Atapuerca in the meseta region of northern Spain. Click on the small photos to bring up more larger and more detailed versions.

Here are a couple of views in northern Spain. The photo to the far left is a shot of the waves breaking on the Cantabrian coast. To the near left is a view of the region just inland, near Santillana Del Mar and the archaeological site of Altamira.

The old part of Santillana Del Mar is for pedestrians only, except for a few residents with cars and, of course, delivery trucks. The houses along the streets (top right) are quite charming, and the old church (bottom right) is 12th Century in age.

Atapuerca is famous for yielding numerous fossils of Neandertals, as well as even earlier ancestors dating to about 700,000 to 800,000 years ago. There are, however, actually a number of archaeological sites here, ranging from these very early ones to as late as the Bronze Age (just a few thousand years B.C.).

To the left top is a view of the hill region containing the several sites at Atapuerca. There is a major fault system there in which the caves formed, and this fault was blasted out by railroad construction in the early 1900s. You can see the rail bed area in the middle photo to the left. At the bottom right is a view of us walking along the rail bed to the site of Atapuerca Dolina, where the fossils dating to about 700,000 to 800,000 years ago were found.

Atapuerca Dolina (top right) has an impressive scaffolding, which is built both for safety concerns and to accommodate excavation at different levels of the sediments exposed by the rail cut. In the middle photo, we see the excavations at the top of the site, and in the lowest photo, the excavations in the middle portion.

Access to Atapuerca Simos de los Huesos, where the Neandertals were found, is through a 500 m passage underground from a Bronze Age cave. This isn't the original entrance, of course, which collapsed sometime in antiquity. In the photo in the top left, we're looking at the shaft sunk into this site so that excavated sediment can be hauled out in buckets. The Bronze Age cave is also in a fault line, which we are entering in the middle photo. There are 38 meters of deposits in this cave, and you see the excavations in the Bronze Age levels in the bottom photo. The top several meters date to the Bronze Age.