Qualla: El Miron Cave

El Miron Cave: Introduction

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jesús Munguía / Gobierno de Cantabria, CC BY 3.0. She was between 35 and 40 when she died, roughly 18,700 years ago. Someone carried her body to the back of El Miron Cave, placed it in a narrow space behind a large limestone block, and coated her bones with ochre, a red iron-based pigment that stained them the color of rust. Archaeologists who discovered her in 2010 named her the Red Lady of El Miron. She is one of the oldest known ritual burials in western Europe, and the care taken with her remains suggests that death, for the people who lived in this cave during the Magdalenian period, was not simply an ending.

Read more: El Miron Cave on Qualla

Image: Jesús Munguía / Gobierno de Cantabria | CC BY 3.0

El Miron Cave: A Cave in the Valley of the Ason

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Thilo Parg, CC BY-SA 4.0. El Miron Cave opens onto the upper Ason River valley toward the eastern end of Cantabria, not far from the border with the Basque Country. It is a large cave by the standards of the region, spacious enough to have sheltered human communities for thousands of years. The town of Ra...

Read more: El Miron Cave on Qualla

Image: Thilo Parg | CC BY-SA 4.0

El Miron Cave: The Red Lady

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jesús Munguía / Gobierno de Cantabria, CC BY 3.0. The team that finally excavated El Miron was led by Lawrence Straus of the University of New Mexico and Manuel Gonzalez Morales of the University of Cantabria. Over years of careful work, they uncovered a rich sequence of prehistoric remains. Then, in 2010, they found her. The Re...

Read more: El Miron Cave on Qualla

Image: Jesús Munguía / Gobierno de Cantabria | CC BY 3.0

El Miron Cave: Art and Survival in the Upper Paleolithic

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Thilo Parg, CC BY-SA 4.0. Beyond the burial, El Miron contains a rich collection of Upper Paleolithic art. The cave walls bear engravings and paintings that place it within the broader tradition of Franco-Cantabrian cave art. A striation-engraved red deer scapula found at the site exemplifies the Magdalen...

Read more: El Miron Cave on Qualla

Image: Thilo Parg | CC BY-SA 4.0

El Miron Cave: A Century Between Discovery and Understanding

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Thilo Parg, CC BY-SA 4.0. The gap between El Miron's discovery in 1903 and its first excavation in 1996 reflects the sheer density of archaeological riches in Cantabria. Alcalde del Rio and Sierra identified dozens of caves across the region, more than any generation of researchers could fully investigate...

Read more: El Miron Cave on Qualla

Image: Thilo Parg | CC BY-SA 4.0