Every night, sometime around two or three in the morning, we get visitors.

 

They don’t knock.

We are staying in Calpe, Spain, on top of a dramatic rocky cliff overlooking the Mediterranean. A narrow one-way paved road circles the place where we are staying, and just beyond it the terrain drops away sharply over rocks and scrub.

And almost every night, a small group of Iberian ibex comes down the mountain.

There seem to be five of them.

I have, naturally, assigned them family roles. Dad. Mom. Two kids. And another relative whose exact relationship I haven’t figured out. An uncle, or nephew perhaps.

The ibex have not confirmed any of this.

The first time we encountered them, it was not nearly so peaceful.

We were coming around the bend in our rented car on our way back to the house when suddenly there they were—several ibex in the road, more than the little group we have since come to recognize.

We startled them, and they startled us.

In an instant, they were jumping over walls and fences and scrambling back onto the sheer cliff, apparently much more comfortable there than standing on pavement with a rental car coming toward them.

Since then, the encounters have been quieter.

 

The mother and youngsters seem to use the road beside our place as a rest stop during their nightly descent. They come off the steep cliff, step onto the pavement and hang around for a while, sometimes only a few yards from us.

 

Dad is different.

He is the impressive one, with the large curved horns. He usually stays above them on the rocks, standing almost motionless, looking down.

Whether he is guarding the family, keeping lookout, or simply refusing to come down onto the road, I have no idea.

 

But he looks magnificent.

Then, after some time, the others move on.

They climb over the low stone wall, put their hooves back onto the cliff and begin descending again.

And this is the part I find almost impossible to understand.

The cliff is steep. Really steep.

It is not terrain I would willingly attempt on foot. Yet these animals move across it as though they were walking down a sidewalk.

 

A few seconds later, they disappear into the darkness.

I have begun waiting for them.

Which, of course, led me to wonder: Who are these creatures?

It turns out they are Iberian ibex, or Spanish ibex—Capra pyrenaica—an animal native to the Iberian Peninsula and one that has been living in these mountains for a very, very long time.

Humans have been watching them for thousands of years.

Archaeological evidence shows that prehistoric people in Spain were studying their movements and hunting them some 15,000 years ago. Ibex and wild goats also appear in ancient rock art across eastern Spain.

I love that connection.

Here I am, standing in the dark in Calpe with my phone in my hand, trying to get another photograph.

Thousands of years ago, someone else was looking at essentially the same animal on essentially the same rocky landscape.

Different technology.

Different intentions.

Same fascination.

And apparently people have always been amazed by the ibex’s ability to negotiate these mountains.

A Spanish writer in the 1600s described wild mountain goats moving across cliffs and rocky terrain so difficult that their agility seemed almost impossible.

Nearly 400 years later, I can report that nothing has changed.

I watch them step onto tiny ledges, climb over rocks and descend surfaces that look almost vertical, and I keep thinking the same thing:

How are you doing that?

Their bodies, of course, are built for it. Powerful legs. Remarkable balance. Hooves adapted for gripping rock.

But knowing the explanation doesn’t make watching them any less astonishing.

There is also a darker part of their history.

Spain once had several distinct forms of Iberian ibex, and not all survived.

The best-known loss was the Pyrenean ibex, or bucardo. The last known individual, a female named Celia, died in 2000.

Then came one of the strangest stories in modern biology.

Scientists had preserved some of Celia’s cells. Using them, they attempted to clone the extinct animal.

In 2003, a cloned Pyrenean ibex was actually born.

For a few minutes, an extinct animal existed again.

It died shortly afterward from lung problems.

An extraordinary, sad little footnote in the long relationship between humans and these animals.

Which brings me back to our five visitors.

For almost all of every day, they live in a world completely separate from ours.

They move across cliffs where we don’t go. They sleep somewhere we cannot see. They follow routes we do not understand.

Then, sometime around two or three in the morning, their path intersects with ours.

 

For a few minutes, Mom and the youngsters step out of their world and onto our paved road.

Dad stays on the rocks above.

We watch them.

They sometimes seem to watch us.

And then they climb back over the wall and disappear down the cliff.

I suspect they don’t find the encounter nearly as interesting as I do.

But tomorrow night, around two or three, I’ll probably be looking for them again.