The experience of being cut off from the world was “excellent and unbeatable,” says Beatrice Flamini, 50.
A Spanish mountain climber has emerged from a cave 70 meters underground where she had spent 500 days isolated from the outside world.
Beatriz Flamini, 50, from Madrid, left the cave in southern Spain shortly after 9 a.m. after being told by her supporters that she had completed the feat she had planned to accomplish on November 21, 2021.
Spanish media said the secret talisman set a new world record, but the claim could not be immediately confirmed.
Blinking and smiling as she hugged well-wishers, Flamini’s first words included asking who would pay for a celebratory round of beer.
In brief comments to reporters, Flamini described the experience of being cut off from the world as “excellent and unbeatable.” Then she asked to be excused because she needed to take a shower, and she hadn’t showered in over 16 months.
In 1987, Italian Maurizio Montalbini set a world record by spending 210 days in a cave. Internet searches turn up reports of a Serb who spent more than 460 days underground in 2016.
Flamini’s quest was part of a project called the Timecave that was designed to study how someone could go alone underground for so long.
Spanish news agency Efi reported that Flamini used two cameras to document her experience and placed the recordings at an exchange point in the cave. Her colleagues dropped off food and other necessities at the retrieval site and picked up whatever she left there.
A group of psychologists, researchers, speleologists, and physical trainers with Timecave studied the recordings but had no direct contact with them.
At a press conference later on Friday, Flamini said she felt like she was still living the day she fell in 2021 and had no idea what had happened in the world since then, including Russia’s war in Ukraine. With no sense of time, she said she stopped trying to count the days after she calculated that she had been there for 60 days.
At no point did Flamini say she felt like giving up, not even during an infestation of flies which she described as the source of her worst memories.
“Actually, I didn’t want to go out,” she said.
Flamini said she used the time to “read, paint, weave, and have fun. I am where I want to be.” She admitted to missing some things but said “it’s part of the project”. “There is nothing to do but accept it.”
She apologized for stumbling over her answers to the questions.
“It’s been a year and a half without me speaking and I’m having a hard time,” she said.
Noting that people at the press conference were wearing face masks, apparently to protect her from infection, Flamini joked that it made her feel like she was still in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.