Altamira National Museum and Research Centre: museums in Santillana del Mar, Cantabria at Spain is culture.

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Museums / Santillana del Mar

Altamira National Museum and Research Centre

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Entrance to the Altamira National Museum and Research Centre ©Turespaña
Neocave, Polychrome Room. Altamira National Museum and Research Centre ©Turespaña

Temporary exhibitions

A planetary voyage. World Heritage rock art

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Altamira: the most beautiful prehistory

A museum to get to know about our first ancestors, their everyday life and art, and to practise their technology.

The museum displays the masterpiece of the first art of humanity, of unique and original art: Altamira, the most beautiful prehistory. With incredible ten- or twenty-thousand-year-old objects made out of stone and bones, we will discover the first people like us -Homo sapiens- who lived in the Cantabrian region. We can discover their technology and tools, and we will be surprised because we still use some of them. We will have fun carving stone or practising techniques for hunting or lighting a fire in the woods and fields at the Altamira Museum.

Essential works

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Large ceiling in Altamira Cave

It is the most renowned cave art masterpiece and one of the most interesting because it displays art by different groups of humans who lived there 13,000 to 22,000 years ago.
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Airbrush

Wing or leg bone of a bird (a wader or bird of prey) cut to create tubes of the same size, used to blow drops of paint.
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Sewing needles and bone from which rods were extracted to make them

This Palaeolithic invention appeared with the same purpose as the current utensil: to make clothes, shoes or hats.
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Harpoons

They are mainly from the Magdalenian era (the last cultural period of the Upper Palaeolithic) and were used to catch fish (especially salmon) and maybe also to hunt other animals.
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Perforated stick

Made from the tip of a deer horn, with a magnificent male deer depicted on it.
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Bison lying down

It is the best example of making the most of the support and natural materials when painting on Palaeolithic caves.
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Female bison

A female bison has an important place in the scene. It is a figure superimposed on others that had been made previously.
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Male bison

This large still male stands out next to a female and they both seem to be important in the herd.
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Black bison

It is drawn with coal, in the same way as charcoal that modern artists use. It is estimated that it was drawn about 13,000 years ago.
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Burins

The burins were made on flint flakes which were knocked on the edges to get a sharp end to engrave on stone, bone or horn.
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Temporary exhibitions

A planetary voyage. World Heritage rock art

This photography exhibition at the Altamira Museum is an invitation to explore the rock art sites that have been declared a part of our World Heritage by the UNESCO on the five continents.
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Collections

The museum's collection is part of the collective catalogue of the Digital Network of Spanish Museum Collections (CERES), conceived as a space for dissemination which enables visitors to browse the various museum collections using the identifying features of each item (author, type of object, iconography, etc.).

Go to museum's collections