Bélmez Faces

Bélmez de la Moraleda is a whitewashed village of about 1,500 people among the olive groves of Jaén province in southern Spain. On 23 August 1971 María Gómez Cámara, a local woman in her fifties, said a human face had formed by itself on the concrete floor of her kitchen. Her husband Juan Pereira and son Miguel broke it up with a pickaxe and laid new cement, but – according to the family – another face appeared in its place. The mayor ordered that it be preserved, and the piece of floor was cut out for study.

Within months the family home was known as La Casa de las Caras, the House of the Faces, and by Easter 1972 hundreds of visitors a day were queuing to see it. Over the next three decades the family reported dozens of new faces, male and female, large and small, some fading and others appearing in different parts of the house. Parapsychologists including Germany’s Hans Bender and Spain’s Germán de Argumosa championed the case, suggesting that the images were “thoughtographs” unconsciously projected by María herself. Neither published a full report.

Skeptics were far less impressed. Within half a year the Madrid newspaper Pueblo, which had first promoted the story, reported that the faces had been made with silver salts, which darken in light. A commission led by José Luis Jordán for the Ministry of the Interior considered several ways of faking them, including a commercial cement-stain remover; later infrared photographs of the most famous face, La Pava, appeared to show added pigment and even brush marks. The case also brought the family income from donations, photographs and press interviews. Analyses commissioned by supporters, including one aired on the TV programme Cuarto Milenio in 2014, reported finding no paint, so believers continue to defend it.

After María Gómez Cámara died in February 2004, a new wave of faces was announced in another house in the village. The newspaper El Mundo reported that they had been faked, and even some paranormal researchers who first endorsed them later called them a fraud. In 2007 the journalists Javier Cavanilles and Francisco Máñez published Los Caras de Bélmez (“The Scoundrels of Bélmez”), naming one of María’s sons as the likely painter. The original faces have been fading ever since.

Faces – some calm, some contorted – that appear to form, change and fade in the cement floors and walls of the house. Believers describe them as growing over days or weeks and say some changed while sealed under glass in the 1970s.

The kitchen floor where the first faces appeared, and later other rooms of the family home; the best-known face, La Pava, was mounted on a wall for display.

The Bélmez Faces are often called Spain’s greatest paranormal mystery and have been the subject of countless magazine features, books and TV specials, notably on Iker Jiménez’s Cuarto Milenio. For skeptics such as Brian Dunning of Skeptoid, they are a textbook example of how a simple hoax can become a cultural phenomenon.