Cueva del Tesoro

About this audio guide

This guide to the Cueva del Tesoro in Málaga follows a legend of five fleeing Almoravid kings said to have hidden their emperor's gold in these galleries in the eleven hundreds, and the centuries-old dinars archaeologists actually found sealed inside a cracked clay lamp. You'll hear about the seventeenth-century friar who wrote the tale down and the generations of treasure hunters it pulled in with picks, torches and dynamite, including a Swiss-born prospector who spent nearly thirty years blasting new tunnels through these passages, convinced the next charge would open a chamber full of coin. The guide also traces footprints pressed into the cave's ancient mud, reckoned to be tens of thousands of years old.