The faces of Bélmez

Bélmez de la Moraleda is a sleepy rural town in in the hills of the Sierra de la Magina in Spain’s principal olive oil region. Here, in the summer of 1971, Maria Gómez Pereira  was playing with her infant grandson in the kitchen of the family home. Suddenly the child cried out excitedly and pointed at the floor. What he had seen there may have been nothing more than a diverting new game to him, but it terrified his grandmother. For the image of a human face had inexplicably appeared on the concrete.

That was the extraordinary claim made by the Pereia family, the house’s occupants. According to their story, the face wore a deeply sorrowful expression that only deepened when they tried to clean it off. Eventually they destroyed the image with a pickaxe, and laid new concrete down. But a few weeks later another face appeared, even more clearly defined than the first.

This time the family involved the local authorities, and the section of concrete was carefully removed and sent away for study. The floor was once again repaired, only for further faces to appear. The media soon picked up the story, resulting in the house becoming a magnet for tourists by the spring of 1972. The phenomenon was to continue for another thirty years.

Experts analysed the images, but were unable to prove that they had been faked. Chemical analysis failed to confirm the use of paints or dyes, though sceptics continued to believe that the family had produced the images by means of some oxidising chemical or pigment that stained the concrete. If the faces were indeed faked by the family, their motive is not obvious. It could not have been financial, as they never charged visitors for entry to the house, and they did not accept donations. While the town of Bélmez may have benefited financially from the tourism boost, the Pereia family did not.

When the floor was excavated in the hopes of finding whatever was causing the phenomenon, a mediaeval cemetery was discovered. The bones were removed and reburied elsewhere, but as soon as the floor was restored, the images began to appear again. Ultra-sensitive microphones placed in the house picked up sounds of strange voices, cries and agonised moans inaudible to the human ear. Despite the disturbances, Maria Gómez Pereia continued to live in the house for the remainder of her life. The faces continued to appear at intermittent intervals over the following decades.

The Bélmez case was dubbed by one investigator as the most important paranormal phenomenon of the twentieth century, and the mystery is still going strong today. Maria Gómez died in 2004, but reports of fresh faces appearing at the property have continued over the last ten years. Doubters continue to claim fraud, but many others regard the phenomenon as genuine. They speculate that the site of the house was once the scene of a terrible incident, perhaps connected with some form of mediaeval witchcraft. Whatever the truth, the house in the once-obscure little town of Bélmez remains one of the most famous sites of alleged paranormal activity in the world.