after arguing with his mother he started digging in the yard to vent his anger, now he has a cave with heating and wifi

This incredible project began when he was only 14 years old and after an argument with his mother, who wanted to force him to change his clothes so that he could leave her house. Now after six years he has a cave with heating and wifi.

The anger he was feeling made him step out onto the patio, grab a shovel and pay for his frustration with the ground, a whole teenage fit that became a way of channeling his emotions. Whenever he felt stressed or angry, he would go to his little hole in the yard, and so, night after night, he would mold his private cave.

This is the story of Andrés Cantó, a 20-year-old from La Romana, a town of about 2,400 inhabitants in the province of Alicante, Spain.

In an interview with the BBC in Spanish, Andrés says that part of his inspiration came from his neighbors, because in the countryside where all the old people live, they have caves, and he started digging the hers with nothing more than a chisel and a hammer.

In 2018, his project began to take shape. At that time he barely had a 1.2 meter deep hole in the ground, but that year he met Andreu Palomero, who is his best friend today. He believed Andrés’ dream could come true and decided to help him by loaning a large electric pickaxe with which they both dug the two meters that were left to reach what is now a room underground.

Together, they made the place grow, collecting gravel, clay, dirt and stones, until more than one person could fit in the hole.

“We always had to mold it into a curved shape, because if you start doing right angles it will fall,” Andrés told the BBC.

The young man said he had always been an architecture enthusiast and that in his spare time he usually built model houses and “strange things”, so his parents weren’t too surprised that he had the project to build his own cave.

“They asked every day” How are you? “,” Are you still digging? “Said the young man, who explained that there were around his house 7 or 8 other caves that belong to his neighbors.

In the six years that construction took, Andrés had to use homemade pulley systems to remove dirt as he enlarged his cave and included pillars to support the walls.

The cave has, according to its owner’s own calculations, about seven square meters and a capacity to accommodate a maximum of seven people.

He also recognized that the cave was very comfortable at all times of the year. In summer, for example, when the temperature can reach around 35 or 40 degrees Celsius, indoors it can be around 20 degrees. But in winter, when the temperature drops below 15 degrees, the cave has a heating system consisting of “coals and a stove”, as well as a fan to exhaust the air.

Outside there is a large layer of earth that separates the entrance from the surface, so the rain was also not a problem, as it was a nearby lake, from which the water has gone. infiltrated the cave several times.

As if that were not enough, he also managed to bring Wi-Fi, thanks to his mobile phone with unlimited data that he places at the entrance and whose signal reaches the room, being able to watch movies and listen to music. music, whether streaming or downloading. them.

Andrés’ story became a social media hit after he decided to make a Twitter thread sharing the process and progress of his private cave. He quickly grew from 300 subscribers to over 3,400, and his discussion thread garnered some 46,000 likes.

After the commotion generated by the dissemination of the project, agents of the Civil Guard and the Nature Protection Service (Seprona) came to the site to make a report.

“They can’t classify it as a basement, a garden shed or a house, and it’s on my family’s land,” said Andrés, who doesn’t know what permit to get.

Now this young man dreams of being an actor and wants to study theater in Valencia, but first he wants to finish his room underground and put it down when he returns to his parents.

He confessed, for his part, that so many years of digging have served him as psychotherapy and that he makes fun of people who think it is crazy to express his anger by digging, because at the end of the day he has his cave.

EB-CP