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On 23 August 1971, in a small white-walled house at Calle Real 5 in Bélmez de la Moraleda, a hill town of about 1,500 in the Spanish province of Jaén, María Gómez Cámara walked into her kitchen and saw a face on the concrete floor. It was a man's face, brownish, indistinct, eyes too large, mouth slightly open. Her husband Juan Pereira and their son Miguel destroyed it with a pickaxe and poured fresh concrete over the spot. According to the family, the face came back. The mayor of Bélmez forbade further destruction and ordered the slab cut out and removed for study.
By Easter 1972 hundreds of tourists were lining up outside the Pereira home, which the family had renamed La Casa de las Caras — the House of the Faces. Coins were collected. Souvenirs were sold. Over the next three decades the Pereiras claimed dozens more faces appeared spontaneously in the floor — male, female, smiling, weeping, large, small. The first and most famous was nicknamed La Pava. Another, ash-grey and bald, was called El Pelao.
Two parapsychologists became the public faces of belief. Hans Bender of Freiburg, the most prominent paranormal researcher in postwar Germany, published brief mentions in his journal Zeitschrift für Parapsychologie. The Spaniard Germán de Argumosa spent two years on site and never published a report at all. Bender's central claim was that the floor sections, after being sealed under transparent plastic sheeting witnessed by a notary, continued to change configuration. He called the phenomenon "thoughtographic" — images projected from the human mind onto matter — and theorised that María Gómez was the unconscious projector.
Spain's Ministry of the Interior was less interested in the supernatural and more interested in the cement. In 1971 it appointed a commission of concrete chemists led by José Luis Jordán, who was vice-president of the Spanish Society of Parapsychology and personally sceptical. Jordán's report identified three plausible chemical methods for producing fake apparitions on a concrete surface: pigmentation with a dark brownish substance, a mixture of soot and vinegar, and the aggressive action of a chemical compound. His most damaging finding was that a particular German-manufactured concrete-stain remover, available in any Spanish hardware shop, would produce dark images that stayed latent and only emerged over time. He summarised: "The mystery that the images were invisible and latent for some time is thereby solved."
Ramos Perera, president of the Spanish Society of Parapsychology, went further. He photographed La Pava under infrared light and found pigment that was not concrete. He could see the marks of brush bristles. "Of course, after that we had no doubts it had been painted." La Pava was at some point removed from the floor and embedded in the wall of the house for tourist viewing.
The believers commissioned their own analyses. In September 1990 Father J.M. Pilón's team scraped two samples — one of 30 milligrams, one of 60 — and sent them to Madrid's Instituto de Cerámica y Vidrio, the ICV, part of Spain's National Research Council. The chemist J.J. Alonso reported the presence of zinc, barium, copper, chromium, phosphorus, and lead in both samples — at concentrations of 0.96 percent zinc in sample A, 0.30 percent phosphorus in sample B, and so on. The Mexican investigator Luis Ruiz-Noguez, writing in the July 1993 Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, pointed out that lead and chromium are pigments used in paint, that lead-based enamels are the cheapest and most common household paints in Spain, and that any of three classes of household chemical — oxidising acids, light-sensitive silver nitrate, or pigment-and-resin enamels — could explain the images. The American sceptic Joe Nickell, who examined photographs, called the faces amateurish in design.
The most efficient debunking came not from a chemistry lab but from a sociologist. Manuel Martín Serrano of the Complutense University of Madrid published Sociología del Milagro — Sociology of the Miracle — in 1972, the first book-length sceptical treatment. He spent the book interviewing Bélmez residents anonymously and traced what he believed was a co-ordinated hoax driven by tourist money.
María Gómez Cámara died in February 2004, aged 85. After her death a new wave of faces appeared. The Madrid newspaper El Mundo published a November 2004 article headlined "New Bélmez Faces Faked by 'Ghostbusters' and Municipal Government," documenting that the post-mortem images had been produced by a paranormal investigator named Pedro Amorós in cooperation with the town council, which depended on the income from the tourists. In May 2007 the journalist Javier Cavanilles and the investigator Francisco Máñez published Los Caras de Bélmez — the title puns on caras, faces, and the Spanish word for scoundrels — and named the original painter: María's own son, Diego Pereira.
There is one outlier. In 2014 the Spanish television show Cuarto Milenio, presented by paranormal advocate Iker Jiménez, ran a fresh forensic study by chemical engineer José Javier Gracenea and forensic criminalist Luis Alamancos. Gracenea reported no paint on the samples. Alamancos tried to reproduce the faces using concrete solvents, hydrochloric acid, and silver nitrate, and could not. He summarised his result: "the words summarising my opinion are absolute bewilderment." The earlier infrared photography of brush bristles in La Pava, the German stain-remover identified by Jordán, the lead and chromium in the ICV chart, the El Mundo exposé of post-2004 forgeries, and the named son Diego Pereira all stand against him.