Spanish athlete emerges after spending 500 days in a cave. Finished reading 60 books during the time

Flamini was 48 when she entered the cave and celebrated two birthdays alone in the cave that was 70m (230ft) deep. She spent her time exercising, drawing, reading, and knitting woolly hats. She managed to finish 60 books during the experiment and also drank 1,000 litres of water, according to her support team.

 

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Inside the cave, she was monitored by a group of psychologists, researchers, and speleologists – specialists in the study of caves – but they did not make contact with her.

However, she did come out for eight days, her team disclosed but stayed isolated in a tent waiting for repairs to a router used to send audios and videos to tell her team how she was doing, according to a report in Reuters.

Spanish TV station footage showed her climbing out of the cave grinning, before hugging her team.
“I’m still stuck on November 21, 2021. I don’t know anything about the world,” she said after exiting the cave as quoted by the BBC.

She described her experience as “excellent, unbeatable”. “I’ve been silent for a year-and-a-half, not talking to anyone but myself,” she said.

Flamini told reporters that she hasn’t touched water for a year-and-a-half and asked if she could take a shower. She said she lost track of time after about two months.

“There was a moment when I had to stop counting the days,” she said, adding that she thought she had been in the cave for “between 160-170 days”. One of the toughest moments came when there was an invasion of flies inside the cave, leaving her covered, she told the BBC.

The extreme athlete also described “auditory hallucinations”. “You are silent and the brain makes it up,” she said.

Experts have been using her time in isolation to study the impact of social isolation and extreme temporary disorientation on people’s perception of time.

Flamini’s support team said she has broken a world record for the longest time spent in a cave, but the Guinness World Records has not confirmed whether there is a record for voluntary time living in a cave.

Asked if she ever thought about pressing her panic button or leaving the cave, she replied: “Never. In fact I didn’t want to come out.”

The Guinness World Records awarded the “longest time survived trapped underground” to the 33 Chilean and Bolivian miners who spent 69 days underground after the collapse of a copper-gold mine in Chile in 2010.