Two kilometers down this path, there's a very special park. Usually on this
channel we visit places that are strange, different, out of the ordinary, that you
would normally not find in a tourist brochure, and that's exactly what this
place is. We've been wandering these dusty paths for about half an hour
trying to find this random spot I found on the internet a couple years ago,
called Parque del los Desvelados, Park of the Sleepless in English. This particular
place is very interesting. A guy named Luis Garcia Vidal started a sculpture
park in the middle of nowhere in 1971. He built something... many of them... for 30
years, and now he's passed away and these statues are rotting in the wilderness.
We are about to visit...
El Parque de los Desvelados
and...
it might be a bit creepy for some of you you.
- Are you ready for the Adventure?
Ha, are you Mrs. Coca Cola?
No! I was hiding it!
It's open!
We saw this photo, remember?
This must be it!
- Is it it? - Yes, are you ready? - I don't know...
Ive been waiting a long time see the place.
Wow... - Oh My God
They're huge!
When I went online, I thought these were made of stone... but it's not it's chicken wire,
barbed wire, and sumac, a local tree. It's quite skinny all wrapped up in
the wire. And he painted them with lime, the white powder, and it's crazy...
If you're going to build sculptures you'd think he'd use something that lasts a
little bit longer, but maybe that was his whole point, right?
Life doesn't last forever, maybe neither should sculptures so he used materials that...
didn't really make it... Well it's been about ten years, and you can see they're all
falling to pieces. Maybe that's what he wanted?
As you can imagine, it seems like Luis was a little bit obsessed with death.
And I guess what you can read online...
What little information there is, says that when he was younger his father died,
and so it was always on his mind.
In his later years he became obsessed with
how dangerous cars were, and throughout the park you could see a lot of these
destroyed cars to remind people that we do this every day.
It's one of the most dangerous things there is to do.
What does it say?
Here it says, "Death Loves Cars"
"A la muerte le gustan los coches"
Death Loves Cars
So! It says I dedicate this sculpture to my brother Alberto, who died at 59 years old.
Who lived like an artist and embraced death with bravery and dignity because he had to live like a human crap
- A human crap? What do you mean?
Here it says Piltrafa Humana
I guess he meant like, most of the artists like he was,
like his brother was... Live in poverty, like poorly, because they don't have support from
government or from people that buy their art so he lived poorly like artists do, or at that time.
- So it actually says human crap. - Yeah, human crap
The whole idea behind the statues were to be a Memento Mori for us, who are still living.
And that means just a reminder that this twisty-turny loop-de-loop the roller coaster we're all on,
doesn't have tracks at the very end
Doesn't matter if you're rich or poor, famous or not, we all have to face that,
and it's something that he thought about a lot, and not a lot of us do. That's why he built the park.
More of the busted cars... It's crazy to think that these were actually in accidents, yeah?
I'm pretty sure this is Sumac, with these little fuzzy berries,
so I'm pretty sure you use large versions of this tree to make the sculptures.
So Luis made these for 30 years and he spent half his time living in Spain,
and he'd come back in the winters to build the skull sculptures. I think there's four or five
that we can find, but they should be scattered all through the countryside here.
Ten meters, or more!
Oh! So this was this is the biggest skull by far,
but one thing that we read online is that he was trying to make a giant
skeleton with the arms with the body, and if you go off to the side of the big one,
You can see... something that was being built...
Oh yeah yeah yeah yeah
You can't see it really well on the camera but look... Sumac, The chicken wire...
And goes all the way up to.... - To the Skull Oh... thus is the body then
This was the body, that was the skull... and so this was going to be an entire skeleton...
- Or it was, and it's destroyed
Or it was and it was destroyed.
Oh yeah look! These are like the arms.
That's right, so this was a whole skeleton. Yeah, these are the arms here.
So, he was like this.
Yeah the skeleton was laying down.
Okay. I don't see any white paint on the
actual frame of the skeleton itself so it makes you think he was working on it,
but didn't finish it before he passed away in 2009.
There's a path, it's kind of worn in but...
Wow this one looks to be... this one looks a lot different than the other ones. Wow.
This one is completely almost destroyed.
Wait no, this one is huge it goes all the way off into the bushes here,
and then all the way over here. Yeah it was massive but there's not very much left.
Just completely wrecked.
This is like a metal screen and you can see the nails and here you can see the sumac.
Strange idea to build these right?
When he died he wanted to be buried here, and do we know which one he could potentially be in?
We read that it's that one to the left
This one here?
So we don't exactly know but... what Luis was saying,
is that he wanted to be buried in a almost like a sarcophagus like an Egyptian pharaoh,
it's supposed to be the one right to the left when you walk in. It looks partially destroyed...
I don't know if he's in there.
Park of the Sleepless!
The ending was a bit cut short
and I want to tell you the story why because it is kind of strange and freaky
so we approached this point where Luis could be buried we don't exactly know
and we tried to look in, and it wasn't... we would have had to break part of the
skull to get a good look inside, and we didn't want to that, but as we were
checking it out we heard this shuffling weird footstep behind us, and
keep in mind... We're in the middle of nowhere, right? We're in the middle of the
woods, and we look... Alone by ourselves... Nobody, nobody was there. we didn't see anybody.
and there's a woman... she's 80+ wearing white just shuffling,
floating by herself... walking super slowly. Walking super slowly on the path and we're like...
What is going on? And so we go over and we're like are you lost? and she speaks
very much like this.. (softly) and she said her name was... Yeah yeah she was like "I'm not lost."