“The worst were the flies,” Beatriz Flamini, 50, said this Friday after spending 500 days in a cave in Motril (Granada), 70 meters deep. Her experiment, supervised by scientists and speleologists, will serve to study the impact of social isolation and the perception of time in people, as well as the possible neurological impacts and changes in sleep and circadian rhythm.
It is still early to assess all of this in this case, and even more so in someone who has shown to have the strength of Beatriz Flamini, who defines herself as an “elite extreme athlete” (her specialty is mountaineering). Her stay underground, without contact with the outside world and completely isolated, breaks all previous records. Her condition is good. “I took the risks and I don’t have anything that I could have.”
The worst moment occurred “following an invasion of flies in the cave. It was a difficult time due to health: I was surrounded by flies and it was something I couldn’t control. But it’s over.” She tried to respect the silence of the cavity, although the absence of sounds and her brain played tricks on her. She had auditory mirages: she heard sounds that didn’t exist. He regrets? Absolutely. She is ready to repeat.
The cave was full of holes and if you dropped something, you could lose it. “That’s why, sometimes, when that happened, I couldn’t hold back and I’d say ‘Nooooo!’ But I tried to be respectful with the house that housed me and that was not mine: the caveâ€. She did not want to give details about that next challenge that she advanced, despite the fact that she hinted that it is quite planned. At the press conference, she was seen smiling at all times.
Some journalists puzzled her when they explained to her some of the many things that have happened in these 500 days. Beatriz Flamini descended into the cave at the age of 48 and has celebrated two of her birthdays there. There were those who told him: a war, an extreme drought… Would you go back down? “Yes, but not for those reasons,” she replied. It was when she recognized that something is already underway and that she did not specify. “Excuse me, this is not the time”
He didn’t know how many days had passed. The feeling underground, she explained, is not that time passes slowly. It is that time does not pass. If she had to say something, she would have believed that she had been in the cave “between 160 and 170 daysâ€. It never occurred to her to press the panic button. “I didn’t want to go out. She didn’t feel like doing it. She was at ease. The cave was very kind to me.”
He did not talk to himself alone during the 500 days. How did you regulate his day to day? Or the night from him to night, I would have to say. “By sensations: he was thirsty; drank; he was hungry, he ate; he was sleepy, he slept; he had insomnia, he would get me up to read â€. Reading has been one of his leisure activities. He has also painted and knitted a lot (wool caps), but above all he has devoted himself to writing. He plans to publish a book.
“If I keep telling so many things, no one will read my work,” he joked at the press conference, in which he looked good, although he apologized several times and asked the informants to repeat the questions, “because in what I did has affected the cave is in near memory. Therefore, he insisted that he assumed the risks. “And nothing has happened to me. The first check-ups have not detected in me any of the problems that I could haveâ€.
