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Spanish ‘Cavewoman’ Stayed Underground For 509 days

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Spanish ‘Cavewoman’ Stayed Underground For 509 days

A 49-year-old Spanish climber beat a self-imposed challenge to go 509 days without making contact with the outside world while trapped 70 meters below in a cave in southern Spain.

Last Friday, when Beatriz Flamini came out, she had to wear sunglasses to protect her eyes from the glare, “I had got on very well with myself, I could’ve stayed a bit longer,” she said laughing. “But I needed a shower.”

She lived in seclusion for one year, four months, and 22 days. Beatriz had no information from the outside world and had no idea how many days had gone within the pitch-black cave.

Her task was to record a documentary for the Spanish business Dokumalia and to test if she could live in what she terms “self-sufficiency.” Since returning, the climber has been receiving treatment from a group of psychologists and medical professionals who are evaluating her condition and assisting her in readjusting to life above ground.

Since Beatriz’s team is worried about her health, she has been unable to respond to Euronews’ queries. David de Antonio, her trainer, instead described her circumstance.

“It’s important to understand that when Beatriz left the cave, she went from zero contact to one hundred percent all at once and that didn’t help her,” said de Antonio.

“This whole adventure will end when she is feeling okay. I see it as if we had climbed Everest. We’re on top and now we have to come down,” he added.

Beatriz is not the first person to attempt to live in a cave for so long. She decided to include some additional difficulties before beginning her journey to make it special. One of them was to remain unaccompanied and without regard to time in a cave.

The climber was clueless as to the day or hour. Inside the cave, her only access to technology was a PC with a “capped” operating system and a camera that she used to document her experience. Beatriz used the router-equipped device to tell the team about her fundamental requirements. When she felt hungry or thirsty, she could request food or water.

Members of the group brought her food, lightbulbs, and batteries. They had previously decided on a location to place the materials so she could retrieve them secretly.

They occasionally even picked up her trash. Her diet consisted primarily of baby food, but every so often they would bring her special goodies like bananas or avocados.

“As she had no time references, she couldn’t have a routine. She didn’t know when to eat or sleep. She couldn’t calculate if she had lunch an hour or a day ago. And she didn’t know if she had slept ten minutes or ten hours,” said her trainer.

Her menstruation was the only thing that gave her the ability to keep track of time.

Although Beatriz did not often contact the team, psychologists utilized communication to gauge her mental health and monitor her progress. She had no other interactions than this with the outside world. No one, not even her family, was aware of anything else.

She faced challenging circumstances throughout her experience. She experienced auditory hallucinations and claimed that because the cave was silent, her “brain invented things”—including occasionally hearing screaming.

The worst, however, was a fly invasion. “Flies came in, they started laying larvae, I couldn’t control it, and I was engulfed by them,” she claimed.

Due to a technological issue, the athlete momentarily left the cave for six days throughout her trip. She referred to the equipment she had inside the cave to connect with her crew as “the router” in her description of how she felt after 300 days.

She set up camp at the cave’s entrance for six days while a technician mended the gadget. After this unexpected occurrence, she returned to the cave. Her team worried that after she came out, she wouldn’t want to go back in.

“The brain is always looking for excuses to give up. This incident complicated things because it could have been the perfect excuse for Beatriz to give up,” said de Antonio.

“The first time you do something it’s easier to take the plunge as you don’t know what you’re going for. The complicated thing is to do the same thing again knowing what you’re up against. The fact that she kept up her challenge even knowing what was going to happen shows her incredible willpower,” he added.

She was able to finish the expedition by remaining steadfast in her resolve. Beatrice recently heard that there is a conflict in Ukraine, but the news of the death of Queen Elizabeth II hit her most.

“They told me she had died,” she confessed to the media in disbelief.

Voluntary solitude has had a negative impact. De Antonio claimed that before entering the cave, they developed a strategy to lessen the damage.

He explained, “She studied with psychologists how to foresee potential circumstances that could happen inside the cave.

He claims that because Beatriz was an athlete, she was already in excellent physical condition, but they also created a training schedule to ensure she wouldn’t lose it. They are currently working to re-establish her connection to the natural order of things.

“No one has been deprived of light for so long. The question her trainers are now asking themselves is how to resume the rhythms healthily,” she said.

De Antonio described the climber’s rehabilitation as an experiment.

“As no one has done something like this, we don’t have an example to follow. The doctors will never come across a case like Beatriz’s, so they are looking at similar cases to be able to treat her.”

These 500 dark days have been a “controlled madness”, as the trainer put it. “A cave is a very hostile environment; human life cannot exist there.”

The climber claimed that she never considered giving up throughout this time, but her coach is baffled as to how she managed it.

He responded, “That’s something she’ll have to tell us in the future. I don’t know what went through her mind, I don’t know if she ever thought about it.”

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