Now Spaniard Marcos Rodriguez Pantoja is 72 years old. At the age of 7, he was abandoned alone in the mountains and was adopted into a wolf pack, in which he lived for 12 years before people discovered him and returned to civilization.
A seven-year-old boy was left on the Sierra Morena ridge and people discovered him only when he was 19 years old. He ran around shaggy and almost naked and could only communicate with the help of a strange grunt. Fortunately, the child did not degrade so much and he managed to regain his human form and teach him to speak again.
“From clothes I only wore windings on my legs, because it was cold in winter. And on my feet I had calluses as hard as stone."
Now Marcos Pantoya lives in his small house in Galicia on a small pension and regrets that he has returned to the people. Since he was taken away from the wolves, he says, his whole life has only gotten worse.
The man says that he tried to adapt to human society, but he was often deceived and used violence against him, and when he worked at a hotel and at a construction site, the bosses mercilessly exploited him and did not pay him a salary.
In Spain, Marcos is known by the nickname "Spanish Mowgli". He often recalls happy days in a cave with wolves and about deer, snakes and bats. that surrounded him. He can still perfectly imitate the wolf howl and cries of a deer.
In these footage, Marcos plays and communicates with the wolves from the reserve.
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Marcos's mother died in childbirth when he was three years old, and his father soon left for another woman. The child was placed under the care of an old shepherd man who took him to the mountains and taught him how to make dishes out of clay. But one day he just left and left the boy alone in the mountains. The boy survived by feeding on roots and berries, and once nailed to a she-wolf with cubs.
Shot from the movie & quot; Among the wolves & quot; (2010) telling the story of Marcos Pantoya.
The she-wolf brought pieces of meat to the cubs and the boy tried to steal one, but the she-wolf growled at him menacingly. However, she did not touch it, and then threw a piece to him.
“I was afraid to touch him, thinking that she would attack me again, but she herself pushed a piece towards me with her nose. I took it and immediately ate it, and then she began to lick me,”- said Marcos in an interview with the BBC in 2013.
Marcos also said that then he had a friend in the form of a snake. He fed her with goat's milk.
The return to civilization for Marcos was akin to shock. He ended up in an orphanage at a nunnery and the nuns taught him to walk straight on two legs and eat at the table. When thick calluses were cut off his feet, he could not walk at all and was temporarily confined to a wheelchair. And when he was first cut and shaved, he was terrified of the sharp razor.
The worst thing for him was getting used to the city noise. Cars and noisy crowds of people walking on the sidewalks frightened him. He also could not get used to sleeping in bed for a long time, he slept on the floor, having built a "nest" of blankets.
Already in our days, Marcos tried to return to those mountains, but saw that a lot had changed there. New cottages were built everywhere and wires were laid, which upset him very much. He still managed to find a pack of wolves in the wilds, but they kept their guard and did not consider him theirs.