(bright energetic music) - Welcome!

Paul here from the Old Spanish Treasure Cave, and today we're gonna step into this adventure.

So, come on in.

(bright energetic music) Well, let's start at the beginning, before this was United States, at one time, Spain used to own this territory.

So the history and legend of the cavern date back when a group of Spanish conquistadors, which are soldiers, that were traveling up to this area, and they came up here through a brutal winter storm.

So they took shelter inside the cavern.

(bright energetic music) Now we do know that they hid their treasure.

They set up a camp in a big room called the council room.

Off the council room, there's a natural chimney where hey had a campfire underneath the natural chimney, and of course that's how they got caught.

(bright energetic music) We know at least one survived because he finished hiding and concealing all the entrances to the cavern, drew a map out on parchment paper, and carved another map into a limestone rock, which we have right outside here.

(bright energetic music) This cavern is a lot different than most.

Now, as you noticed, once we step in, it's gonna be one of the very few caves or caverns you'll ever enter, that you're gonna go up into it.

You'll also notice as we go in that there's passages hidden off in the shadows everywhere.

And that's one of the fun things about this cavern.

This is a very large cavern.

We are still exploring it.

We're still finding new areas, new rooms, and we believe we know where the treasure is at, which I'll show you later on once we get to that point.

One of the fun things is that the cavern is a very, very large cavern.

We're still surveying and mapping it.

Now on the middle portion of what we're gonna see, we've already mapped out over a mile of passages.

(bright energetic music) We're gonna go into Amaze Cave.

There are three different levels.

There's an entire upper level, and we're just gonna see just a small portion of the middle level.

And then there's a lower level.

So it's like stacking three mazes, right on top of each other.

(bright energetic music) One of the fun things that you can do when you go to the Old Spanish Treasure Cave is bringing your imagination.

You can imagine some fun things in there.

Like we have a wall full of jellyfish or the enchanted forest, just some fun things like that.

The Titanic.

We're gonna find a lot of fossils, this was once an ancient seabed.

So this limestone is what we refer to as a sedimentary rock.

And that's where previous ocean life was.

And we're gonna look at some fossils like crinoids and brachial pods.

Brachial pods are kind of like ancient plant shells.

(bright energetic music) It's a natural cavern.

We're trying to keep the cavern in its most natural state as we can and still bring people through.

The floor is gonna be a natural kaolin clay floor.

Of course, we do have handrails and walkways that you can use.

So, the reason why we believe the treasure is in this one area is because it's a spring and it was several years ago we had a severe drought throughout this region.

So we got down to this area and we were looking around, we found some symbols carved in the wall and what we found, it looked like a, kind of like a candy cane and had an eyeball and a squiggly line above the eyeball.

I turned around, I looked where the eye was pointing.

And there's a little space between the floor and the wall.

When you look in that little space and you'll see a little room with the long pool of water.

And we found this very, very old wood, that was just encased in the clay.

It was literally falling apart as were taking it out.

And before we could open up that big enough to get into, the rains came in, the water table rose, and it's been flooded ever since then.

(bright energetic music) Thank you for joining us here at the Old Spanish Treasure Cave, located here in Sulphur Springs, Arkansas.

So come on out and join us!