He became known as “the wolf boy of Sierra Morena.”
For most of his childhood, Marcos Rodríguez Pantoja lived in these remote Spanish mountains, isolated from human contact.
He spent 12 extraordinary years being raised by wolves, after early tragedy had led to his abandonment.
Rodríguez eventually returned to civilization and settled in the hamlet of Rante in 2001, where he lived until his death last week, aged 80, according to the local government of San Cibrao das Viñas.
“He was a person made of earth, wind, air, rain, and hunting dens,” Arturo Arcones, who knew Rodríguez in his final years, told Spain’s public broadcaster RTVE.
“He always said that his happiest life was with the wolves, because he didn’t feel very comfortable with humans.”
Born in 1946, in a country recovering from a civil war and a world war, Rodríguez entered a life marked by poverty in the southern Spanish village of Añora.
After his mother’s death, Rodríguez’s siblings went to live with relatives while he stayed with his father, who remarried and moved the family to the Sierra Morena mountains to make charcoal, according to Professor Gabriel Janer Manila. As part of a social study, Manila spent five months interviewing Rodríguez for the philosophy department at the University of Palma de Mallorca.
Pantoja was abused by his stepmother and was sold by his father to an elderly goat herder when he was just seven, public broadcaster RTVE reported.
“They took me to the mountains, to a cave. A little old man with a beard came out wearing cork shoes,” Pantoja told Manila in an interview, describing an initiation into a wilderness existence.
“There were howling wolves, foxes, mountain goats, deer, scorpions, snakes. At night, I heard these animals and I was afraid.”
The herder cared for Pantoja, keeping him warm with animal skins, teaching him to milk the goats, and how to hunt rabbits with a stick.
Under the old man’s tutelage, Pantoja learned “the law of the jungle,” Manila wrote in his study.
He understood he was different – “especially because he had hands” – but still felt part of their community, Manila wrote. He mastered animal sounds, from birdsong to the cry of the deer, and believed he could communicate “effortlessly with foxes, wolves and even snakes.”
When the herder disappeared unexpectedly, Pantoja drew on the skills he had learned to survive on his own and gained the trust of a wolf pack by bringing food for their cubs and howling when he sensed danger.
“I was crying and they jumped up at me… then they showed me the way to their cave, the wolf’s den,” Pantoja told Manila, describing the pups playing and jumping around as they greeted him.
Pantoja avoided civilization, hiding whenever he heard human voices, until the Civil Guard found him, aged 19, “lost and alone, among the ravines,” Manila wrote.
“I was doing very well and I didn’t know what money was but I never lacked food,” Pantoja told RTVE news show Informe Semanal in 2010.
“If I wanted to 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 the wolves. I let out a howl, I hid in the river and the wolves brought the cattle down to me.”
Those who met Pantoja during the first months of his reintegration into society recalled his intelligence of nature and his “wild character,” Manila wrote in his study.
The scholar noted his “complete lack of awareness when it came to social life, his language difficulties – especially his lack of knowledge of the names of things – his strange gait, his naiveté.”
After being caught by the Guardia Civil in 1965, Pantoja lived with a priest in the southern city of Jaén, and with nuns in the capital Madrid. After completing his military service he ended up in Mallorca working in hotels and restaurants, RTVE said in a 2010 report.
While on the Balearic island he had a chance encounter with anthropologist Manila, who studied his journey and became the first person to believe him, RTVE said.
In his later years, Pantoja dedicated himself to sharing his story, “with the intention of protecting nature and fostering a better understanding of it,” his friend Arcones told RTVE.
His life continued to draw interest, with Manila publishing his doctoral thesis as a book, “I played with Wolves,” and the release of a film adaptation of his life, “Among Wolves.”
Pantoja built a new life in Rante, sharing a home with a retired police officer, according to a tribute from the local government posted Monday on social media.
Later, a fellow resident gave him a house, and neighbors supported him, especially during his final two years of illness.
“Marcos arrived in Rante with a story that the world knew,” the tribute read. “He leaves, leaving here a story that is also ours.”
CNN’s Mauricio Torres contributed to this report.
