The Bélmez Faces: faces in the concrete floor of La Casa de las Caras

Bélmez de la Moraleda is a village of about 2,000 people in the province of Jaén, in Andalusia. At Calle Real 5 lived María Gómez Cámara, born in 1919. Skeptoid would later call her a local psychic. Her home would become La Casa de las Caras. The House of the Faces.

Monday, 23 August 1971. María saw a face forming on her concrete floor. She called the neighbours. Accounts differ on what came next. In one, her husband Juan Pereira and son Miguel broke it up with a pickaxe and laid new concrete. In another, the mason Sebastián Fuentes León scraped it off and plastered over it. Either way, a new face returned. It became known as La Pava, the Turkey Hen. It is now kept behind glass.

For some thirty years the family said the faces kept coming. Men and women. Different sizes, different expressions, sometimes overlapping. They earned names. El Pelao, the Bald One. El niño, the child. The Dama de la Copa, the Lady of the Cup. Witnesses said they moved, changed shape and faded. By Easter 1972, hundreds of visitors had come.

The mayor forbade destroying the faces and had the concrete cut out for study. Antonio Casado of Pueblo carried the story across Spain, under the headline "las caras hablan". The faces speak.

The parapsychologist Germán de Argumosa led the early research, joined by Hans Bender of Freiburg. Notary Antonio Palacios Luque sealed the room for three months, in front of German television cameras. When it reopened, new faces had appeared. Bender wrote in a 1973 newsletter that a face had changed while the area was sealed. Neither man ever published an official report. Argumosa also recorded voices asking for the floor and walls to be dug up. When the floor was dug, human remains were found, according to María's granddaughter María Pereira.

The laboratories never agreed. Ramos Perera's infrared photography of La Pava showed added pigment. "Of course, after that we had no doubts it had been painted." The Instituto de Cerámica y Vidrio of the CSIC took samples in 1990, and its results were reported as showing no traces of paint. In 2014, Cuarto Milenio brought in experts. Chemical engineer José Javier Gracenea found the images were not paint. Forensic criminalist Luis Alamancos could not reproduce them. His verdict was "desconcierto absoluto". Absolute bewilderment.

Sceptics saw fraud. Joe Nickell called the faces deliberate, amateurish fakes. César Tort favoured lead-based enamel paint or an oxidising acid. Brian Dunning suggested they were painted and later treated with acid. Others pointed to profit. Admission charges. Tourism. A trademark registered in 2005.

María died in February 2004. That year Pedro Amorós announced new faces at her birthplace. Francisco Máñez showed that wetting the floor brought out matching "faces". In El Mundo, Javier Cavanilles reported that the new faces were faked with the town council's complicity. His 2007 book with Máñez, Los caras de Bélmez, named her son Diego Pereira as the painter.

Believers still cite the notarial seals. A second seal in 2011 was followed by reports of new faces. In 2018, Gerhard Mayer of the IGPP and Pilar Ramiro de Pano reviewed the analyses and found the silver-salt and colouring-substance explanations unsupported. Andrew MacKenzie opened The Seen and the Unseen with the case. The house is open to visitors, and an interpretation centre opened in the village in February 2013. More than half a century on, the argument has not ended.