Talk Explores Spain's Cave Paintings

Visiting scholar Araceli Ardón will lecture on “The Caves of Altamira, Spain: A guided Tour of the Oldest Museum in the World” Thursday, Nov. 1, at 3:30 p.m. in Westmont’s Hieronymus Lounge. Ardón is one of the few people in the past three decades who have entered Altamira Cave, famous for its Upper Paleolithic paintings.

Ardón served as director of the Museum of Art in Querétaro, Mexico for eight years before getting the chance of a lifetime.

“I took a course on museology in Spain and one of the professors was the director of the Pre-Historical Research Center at Altamira,” she says. “He let five students go into the caves, which have been closed to the public for 30 years. I felt so privileged. I fell in love.

“The paintings, drawings, engravings, sculptures and other forms of art that were preserved in Altamira for 15,000 years tell us lots of things about pre-history, art and the preservation of monuments. An amazing replica was recently built and I will talk about the use of contemporary technology in a prehistorical context.”

Ardón has been a professor of Spanish as a second language and Latin American literature for more than 20 years in Mexico and the U.S. She has taught students studying in the Westmont in Mexico program at the Interamerican University Studies Institute in Querétaro.

She has written biographies of Mexican entrepreneurs Roberto Ruiz and Fernando Barba, a children’s book, “La pandilla de Miguel,” a novel, “Historias íntimas de la casa de Don Eulogio,” and the short-story compilation “El arzobispo de gorro azul.” One of her stories “It is Nothing of Mine,” translated by C.M. Mayo, was selected to appear in the anthology “Mexico: A Traveler’s Literary Companion,” published last year by Whereabouts Press.

The free, public lecture is sponsored by the Westmont department of modern languages.