recently stumbled upon an interesting Facebook thread about candlelight drawings scratched on the wall of a Spanish Inquisition jail cell in the early 1500s.
The sponsor of this conversation, Ruta Conquistadores, had published copies of photos of the “mural” and made them available for public viewing in the Museo Histórico de Llerena, a small town in Spain’s Extremadura region.
The drawings appear to show Spanish soldiers, native Mexicans and several huge snakes possibly adorned with feathers.
To find out who might have been drawing conquistadores and Quetzalcoatl on the wall of a Spanish calaboose at such an early date, I contacted Luisma Domínguez, director of Ruta Conquistadores, who kindly forwarded me explanations of the curious drawings by local historian Manuel Toro and archivist Francisco Mateos.
“We see a great many Spanish soldiers, which may represent Hernán Cortés and his men,” Toro wrote. “Among them walks a woman who may be La Malinche. There is a very large cross and below it a figure that might be the author of the mural. There are birds and animals in the drawing and some huge serpents. Since we have only small snakes in Spain, I suppose all these things represent scenes in America, perhaps drawn by a soldier from this region, Extremadura, who ran afoul of the Inquisition.”
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