A Spanish woman has emerged from spending 500 days living 70 metres deep in a cave in Russia with no contact with the outside world.
The extreme athlete was part of an experiment closely monitored by scientists seeking to learn more about the capacities of the human mind and circadian rhythms.
Beatriz Flamini, an elite mountaineer and climber, is said by her support team to have broken a world record for longest time spent in a cave.
She was 48 when she went into the cave, and celebrated two birthdays alone underground.
But after emerging Flamini admitted she didn’t want to come out because she was stilling reading a good book.
The 50-year-old began her challenge on November 20, 2021 — before the outbreak of the Ukraine war, the cost of living crisis, and the death of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II.
Flamini spent her time underground doing exercises, painting, drawing and knitting woolly hats.
She got through 60 books and 1000 litres of water, according to her support team, and took two GoPro cameras to document her time.
Flamini was watched by a group of psychologists, researchers, speleologists — specialists in the study of caves — and physical trainers who monitored her physical and mental wellbeing, though never made contact.
Media coverage of her emergence into the light of spring in southern Spain was limited so as not to overwhelm her.
But a broadcast on national television station TVE showed her wearing dark glasses and climbing out towards her support team grinning. They encircled her in a hug.
Speaking shortly afterwards, she described her experience as “excellent, unbeatable”.
According to Spanish news agency EFE, her experience has been used by scientists at the universities of Granada and Almeria and a Madrid-based sleep clinic.
They were studying the impact of social isolation and extreme temporary disorientation on people’s perception of time, the psychological changes humans undergo underground and the impact on circadian rhythms and sleep.
Guinness World Records awards the “longest time survived trapped underground” to 33 miners who spent 69 days underground after the collapse of Chile’s San Jose mine in 2010.
A spokesman was not able to immediately confirm whether there was a separate record for voluntary time living in a cave and whether Flamini had broken it.
