He became known as “The Wolf Boy of Sierra Morena.”
Marcos Rodríguez Pantoja spent most of his childhood in the remote mountains of Spain, isolated from human contact.
He spent an amazing 12 years being raised by wolves after being abandoned due to an early tragedy.
Rodriguez eventually returned to civilization and settled in the village of Lante in 2001, where he lived until his death last week at the age of 80, according to the local government of San Cibrao das Vinas.
“He was a man made of earth, wind, air, rain and hunting dens,” Arturo Alcones, who knew Rodríguez in his later years, told Spanish public broadcaster RTVE.
“He always said his happiest life was with wolves, because he wasn’t very comfortable with humans.”
Born in 1946 in a country recovering from civil war and world war, Rodríguez lived a life of poverty in the village of Añora in southern Spain.
After their mother’s death, Rodríguez’s siblings moved in with relatives, and Rodríguez remained with his father, who had remarried, and the family moved to the Sierra Morena Mountains to make charcoal, said Professor Gabriel Janelle Manila. As part of its social research, Manila spent five months interviewing Mr. Rodríguez, a professor of philosophy at the University of Palma de Mallorca.
Public broadcaster RTVE reported that Pantoja was abused by his stepmother and sold by his father to an old goat herder at the age of seven.
“They took me to the mountains and caves. A little old man with a beard came out wearing cork shoes,” Pantoja said in an interview in Manila, describing his introduction to life in the wilderness.
“There were howling wolves, foxes, mountain goats, deer, scorpions, and snakes. It was scary to hear these animals at night.”
The pastoralists cared for Pantoja, keeping him warm with animal skins, and teaching him how to milk goats and hunt rabbits with sticks.
Under the old man’s tutelage, Pantoja learned the “laws of the jungle,” Manila wrote in his study.
He knew he was different from the others — “especially because he had hands,” Manila wrote — and yet felt part of their community. He mastered animal sounds, from bird calls to deer calls, and believed he could communicate “with ease with foxes, wolves, and even snakes.”
When the nomad unexpectedly disappeared, Pantoja applied the skills he had learned to survive on his own, gaining their trust by delivering food to the wolf pack and howling when he sensed danger.
“When I was crying, they jumped on me… and they showed me the way to the cave, which is the wolf’s den,” Pantoja told Manila, explaining that the puppies who greeted him were playing and jumping up and down.
Pantoja avoided civilization and hid at the sound of human voices, but the 19-year-old was found by private security “lost and alone in a ravine,” Manila wrote.
“I was doing very well, I didn’t know what money was, but I never lacked food,” Pantoja told RTVE news program Informe Semanal in 2010.
“If I wanted fish, I fished in the river. If I wanted a rabbit, I caught it. If I wanted a deer, I called to my parents, who were wolves. I howled and hid in the river, and the wolf brought the cow to me.”
People who met Pantoja during his first months back in society remembered his intelligence and “wild nature,” Manila wrote in the research paper.
The scholar noted his “total lack of awareness regarding social life, difficulties with language, especially lack of knowledge of the names of things, strange gait, and naivety.”
After being arrested by Guardia citizens in 1965, Pantoja lived with a priest in the southern city of Jaén and with nuns in the capital Madrid. RTVE said in a 2010 report that after completing his military service, he ended up working in hotels and restaurants on Mallorca.
According to RTVE, during his stay in the Balearic Islands, he happened to meet Manila, an anthropologist who had studied his travels and was the first to believe in him.
In his later years, Pantoja dedicated himself to sharing his story “with the aim of protecting nature and promoting a deeper understanding of nature,” his friend Alcones told RTVE.
His life story continued to garner interest, with his doctoral thesis “I play with Wolves” published in Manila, and the film “Among Wolves” about his life released.
According to a local government memorial posted on social media on Monday, Pantoja built a new life in Lante, sharing a house with a former police officer.
His fellow residents then gave him a home, and his neighbors supported him, especially during the last two years of his illness.
“Marcos arrived in Lante with a story for the world to know,” the memorial read. “He goes away and leaves here a story that is also our story.”
