Bélmez de la Moraleda is a village of a few thousand people in the olive country of Jaén province, in Andalusia. Since 1971 it has been known for one house, at number 5 Calle Real, where faces are said to appear in the floor.
What happened
The accepted starting point is August 23, 1971. María Gómez Cámara, then in her early fifties, noticed a mark on the cement floor of her house that looked to her like a face; by her son Miguel’s later account she asked who had painted it. Neighbors were called in. Miguel broke up the patch and laid new cement, and within days a second face, the one later nicknamed “La Pava,” had appeared in its place. That image was eventually cut out of the floor and is now set into a wall of the living room behind glass. The local newspaper Diario Jaén reported the story in 1971, Ideal of Granada followed with a longer piece in September, and by the following Easter hundreds of visitors were arriving to see La Casa de las Caras.
The faces did not stop. Over the next three decades the family reported dozens, male and female, of different sizes and expressions, forming, changing and fading on the kitchen and hallway floors. Workers who dug beneath the kitchen are said to have reached a depth of nearly three meters and found two headless skeletons from a medieval cemetery, which the village had been built over. María Gómez died in February 2004 at the age of 85; the village later named a street after her and made her an honorary citizen.
The investigation
Parapsychologists arrived early. Germán de Argumosa, Spain’s best-known investigator of the paranormal, visited repeatedly and recorded what he presented as voices from the floor; the German researcher Hans Bender also took up the case, though neither published a formal report. In 1973 the house was sealed for three months under notarial supervision and new faces were reported when the seal came off, an event believers still cite as the strongest evidence. A second notarial seal was applied in 2011 with, the family says, the same result.
The laboratory record is contradictory. Samples went to a Valencia institute in 1975. In 1990 a team led by a priest, José María Pilón, took small samples from two faces to the Instituto de Cerámica y Vidrio in Madrid; the published summary reported no paint, but the chart of results showed zinc, lead and chromium, and the exact faces and sampling points were never specified. In July 1993 Luis Ruiz-Noguez, writing in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, argued that those metals are the cations of common pigments and that lead and chromium in particular pointed to paint. A skeptical study by Manuel Martín Serrano as early as 1972 described a hoax run for money, and the American investigator Joe Nickell reached the same conclusion in 1993. In 2014 a forensic analysis commissioned by the television program Cuarto Milenio reported no paint and no sign of external manipulation, while a specialist who tried to reproduce the images said he could not. The two sets of findings have never been reconciled.
The explanations
Believers hold that the faces are thoughtographic, impressed on the floor by María’s unconscious mind, which is why they expected the phenomenon to stop at her death. It did not. Within months a local paranormal society announced new faces in another house in the village, which the newspaper El Mundo reported had been faked with the knowledge of municipal officials. A 2007 book went further and named María’s son Diego as the painter of the original faces.
The skeptical case is simple. The faces have only ever appeared in one family’s house, never under observation, and always in a form that paint or a mild acid on cement can produce; Brian Dunning summarizes the method as paint at first and acid later. Tests that found pigment metals were explained away, and tests that found none were small, late and poorly documented. The family charged for admission and the village has built an interpretation center on the trade.
Where it stands
La Pava is still on the wall, visitors still come, and the house is still run by María’s descendants. Nothing resembling a controlled appearance has ever been recorded in more than fifty years, which is the single fact that matters most. The verdict is mostly false: the images exist, their origin is almost certainly human, and a small margin of unexplained test results keeps the argument alive.