Marcos Rodríguez Pantoja, Spain’s famous “wolf boy”, has, as has now emerged, died on Saturday 15 August at the age of 80.
Born in 1946 in a country that was just recovering from a civil war and a world war, Rodríguez initially grew up in the Andalusian village of Añora.
Rodríguez’s life was marked by poverty, hunger and mistreatment. His father could barely feed the family, while his stepmother treated him brutally. When he was six, his father sold him to a goatherd, who left him in a remote valley where he was to herd livestock together with an old shepherd. The herdsman taught him how to survive in the mountains and use the resources available.
He hid from people
When the shepherd died shortly afterwards, Marcos was left to fend for himself. Over time he turned the wilderness into his home and found a family in the animals that surrounded him.
For twelve years Rodríguez lived a life without any human contact and developed his own forms of communication. He mastered the calls of the animals – from birdsong to the cry of the deer – and was convinced he could communicate effortlessly with foxes, wolves and even snakes. Throughout all those years he chose to stay far from civilisation and would run away or hide whenever he heard human voices in the mountains.
Rodríguez won the trust of a wolf pack when he fed its cubs and howled whenever he sensed danger.
The anthropologist Professor Gabriel Janer Manila carried out several months of interviews with Rodríguez as part of a social science study for the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Palma de Mallorca. The interviews took place from November 1975 to April 1976.
Janer, the anthropologist, became a friend. In his view, Rodríguez was able to survive thanks to his intelligence and imagination. In his doctoral thesis Janer describes the different phases of Rodríguez’s life: how he gradually became part of this community, how he learned its rules and the language of his surroundings, and how he treated the animals as equals.
“I cried and they jumped up onto me… then they showed me the way to their cave, the wolves’ den,” Rodríguez told Janer. He described how the wolf cubs played around him and leapt up at him as they greeted him.
Apparently, over time a kind of symbiosis emerged between him and the wolves.
“If I wanted fish, I went to the river and fished; if I wanted a rabbit, I caught one; if I wanted a deer, I called my parents, the wolves, let out a howl, hid in the river and the wolves drove the animals down to me,” he said.
Janer later published his study in Spain as a book titled He jugado con lobos.
In 2010 a team from the TVE programme Informe Semanal spoke to Rodríguez in his home town Añora. At that point he was visiting the town for the first time in 60 years. Looking back on his time in the mountains, he told the camera: “I was very well. I didn’t know what money was, but I always had enough to eat.”
When he was discovered by the Guardia Civil in 1965 at the age of 19, he had to get used once again to life in human society: a difficult and lengthy process of adaptation. Rodríguez later stressed repeatedly that he had been happy in the mountains. His real suffering, he said, only began when he was found and forced to integrate into society.
Childlike naivety preserved
According to people who knew him, he seemed childlike in some ways, was “naive” about society and did not speak completely fluent Spanish.
He lived in Jaén with a priest, later in Madrid with nuns, did military service and eventually ended up in Mallorca, where he worked in hotels and restaurants.
After everything he had experienced in his life, Rodríguez decided to pass on his story – with the aim of “protecting nature and promoting a better understanding of it, because we have become so distanced from it”.
He particularly wanted to convey this message to children: “Show more affection to your pets, because devices only need to be plugged in, but pets need love.”
His life story was also brought to the big screen: “Wolfsbrüder” (original title: Entrelobos, German title: Wolfsbrüder) was released in Spain on 26 November 2010, and two years later, on 7 June 2012, the feature film was released in Germany.
Since 2001 Rodríguez had found a home in the village of Rante in the province of Ourense. The municipality of San Cibrao das Viñas, to which Rante belongs, said goodbye to its long-standing resident in moving words. “Marcos came to Rante with a story the whole world knew. He leaves behind a story that has become ours too,” the municipality wrote on social media.
Rodríguez died during the festival held in honour of the municipality’s patron saint.