The Bélmez Faces: the House of the Faces at Bélmez de la Moraleda

Bélmez de la Moraleda is a village of about 2,000 people in the Sierra Mágina, in the Andalusian province of Jaén. María Gómez Cámara lived at Calle Real 5 with her family. Then came August 23, 1971.

María was cooking in her kitchen. She saw a face forming in the concrete floor. Frightened, she ran out and called the neighbours. It had "perfectly recognizable human features," one newspaper later wrote, and "appeared to be watching whoever looked at it." Over the following days it took shape.

Her son Miguel Pereira Gómez recalled the moment. "Come here and look if you see something." María answered: "But of course I see it, it is a face."

The family wanted it gone. Accounts differ on who did the work, but the floor was broken up or plastered over. Days later, a face returned. That first face, La Pava, was eventually cut out and set into the wall behind glass. It is still there.

Others followed, including El Pelao, the bald one, El Niño, the child, El Barbudo, the bearded man, and La Dama de la Copa, the Lady of the Cup. Later photographs reportedly showed the Lady of the Cup's arm changing position before the figure vanished. Over the years the faces appeared, faded and reappeared, in dozens by some accounts and hundreds by others. By Easter 1972, hundreds of visitors were coming to the house. The Madrid paper Pueblo reported strange voices recorded in the room, and on February 14, 1972, its front page read "las caras hablan," or "the faces speak."

Mayor Manuel Rodríguez Rivas banned further destruction. The kitchen was excavated. Beneath it lay human remains, by some accounts headless skeletons. Their age is disputed. The 13th century, or around 1860.

In 1973 the notary Antonio Palacios Luque sealed the kitchen for three months. German television cameras were there, and so was the Freiburg professor Hans Bender. The floor was divided into numbered squares and photographed. When the seal came off, new faces had emerged and others had moved. Bender reported "slight changes of the faces' configuration" while the room was sealed. Photographs reportedly showed the Lady of the Cup's arm changing position before she vanished entirely.

By 1972 Pueblo had called the case a fraud, and Ideal reported analyses pointing to silver salts. A Ministry of the Interior commission under José Luis Jordán said a German concrete stain remover could reproduce the faces. Sceptics Luis Ruiz-Noguez and César Tort saw pigment in later laboratory results. Brian Dunning of Skeptoid argued fraud for profit.

Others disagreed. Bender and Germán de Argumosa suggested María was unconsciously projecting the images. Later CSIC analyses were reported to find no silver salts. In 2014 a forensic team for Cuarto Milenio concluded the images "weren't made with paint."

María died in February 2004, aged 85. That year "new faces" were announced. On November 28, El Mundo reported that they had been faked by "ghostbusters" in collusion with the town council. A 2007 book by Javier Cavanilles and Francisco Máñez named her son Diego Pereira as the painter. In 2018, Gerhard Mayer and Pilar Ramiro de Pano of the IGPP argued against both the silver salt and paint explanations. An interpretation centre opened in the village in 2013. The case remains unresolved.