On August 23, 1971, María Gómez Cámara, a 50-year-old housewife in the small village of Bélmez de la Moraleda in Jaén Province, Andalusia, southern Spain, noticed an apparently human face forming in the concrete floor of her kitchen. Over the following days, the face darkened and acquired detailed features: a distinct pair of eyes, a nose, and a mouth with an expression the village priest described as one of profound sadness. María's husband Juan destroyed the original face with a pickaxe on September 6, 1971, and the floor was re-poured with fresh concrete. Within weeks, a new face began forming in exactly the same position. Over the following decades, more than eighteen distinct faces appeared in the kitchen floor of 5 Rodríguez Acosta Street, each with different features and expressions.
Local authorities ordered an excavation of the Gómez kitchen in April 1972. Archaeological digging beneath the house revealed human remains dating to the Spanish medieval period — specifically, the skeletons of several individuals who had evidently been buried in an informal cemetery that had occupied the site before the nineteenth-century houses were built. The bones were exhumed and reinterred in the village cemetery, but the faces continued to appear. Spanish parapsychologist Germán de Argumosa conducted ten years of on-site investigation, documenting each new face photographically, sampling the concrete chemistry, and supervising sealed-chamber tests in which the freshly-formed faces were photographed, covered with transparent plastic, and sealed until daylight to rule out nocturnal tampering. The faces continued to form even under sealed conditions.
The Bélmez Faces have been studied by Hans Bender of the University of Freiburg, Jürgen Keil of the University of Tasmania, and by representatives of the Vatican (who in 1978 declined to issue a formal ruling). Skeptical analyses have proposed that the faces represent human-directed painting with silver salts or oxidizing chemicals, though the sealed-chamber documentation and the cumulative decades of new faces are difficult to explain through any hoax hypothesis. María Gómez died in 2004; new faces reportedly continue to form occasionally in the now-empty kitchen floor. The Bélmez Faces are the single most thoroughly-documented paranormal materialization event in European history and a landmark in international paranormal research.