Ladies with Art and Mystery: the Lady of Elche

His world suddenly disappeared in those dark and impenetrable pools of history.

But perhaps it is a consequence of some kind of extrovert poetic justice, that the same History that buried them, returned them commiseratively again in the light of day, full of beauty and mystery.

Among all the discoveries, it is possibly the Lady of Elche, the one who has raised more expectation and suspicion, not only among archaeologists and historians, but among the general public.

In fact, it is one of the most visited and claimed pieces of the immense amount of historical waste that makes up the immense collection of the National Archaeological Museum of Madrid.

Its mysterious rarity, the enigmatic of its complex attire and its unchanging hieratism, have made it the invaluable focus of many conjectures and hypotheses, to which of them more elaborate and fantastic.

For that undisputed leader of Fantastic Realism - or as it was called with a certain air of pomp and circumstance in those happy eighties, the 'Astroarchaeology' - that was the Swiss Erich von Däniken, the Lady of Elche represented something as sublime as the Venus of Botticheli, but in extraterrestrial version.

Priestess, queen or goddess, the truth is that this splendid lady of the pre-Christian chasms of Old Hispania continues, like Leonardo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa, challenging and captivating us with the eternal charm of her incomprehensible smile.

NOTICE: Both the text and the accompanying photographs are my exclusive intellectual property.