Fourteen kilometers west of Tangier, at Cape Spartel, I entered a dark, damp cave that suggested nothing. Then I turned towards the sea and stopped.

The opening overlooking the Atlantic draws the continent of Africa. It is not a distant resemblance that requires imagination, but rather a clear shape: the Horn of Africa, the curvature of the west, and the tip of the south. Its name among the people is the “Map of Africa”, and the cave is called the Cave of Hercules.

The first funny thing is that the map is upside down. You stand inside the cave, and you see the image of the continent in the mirror, not the continent itself. The most famous tourist snapshot in northern Morocco is Africa in reverse... and no one pays attention.

The second joke is even funnier. A large part of the cave was not made by nature, but rather by the Berbers of the region, who used to cut stone discs from its walls to make flour mills from them. Century after century, the cave expanded and its shape changed, and circles remained engraved on the walls as if they were fingerprints. That is, an entire continent was mapped by chance, by people who were searching for flour.
The strangest thing is that no one at that time knew what Africa looked like at all. The continent's borders were not drawn on paper until centuries after those stonecutters. The resemblance was not made... but was discovered very late.

As for the name, it comes from a Greek myth that says that Hercules slept here before his eleventh mission, when he went to steal golden apples. Because the cave seemed long and bottomless, people believed for centuries that it was the mouth of a twenty-four-kilometre-long tunnel that passed under the Strait of Gibraltar and exited in St. Michael's Cave on the other side. The tunnel was not found, of course, but the story is longer lasting than any scientific investigation.

The cave was not scientifically documented until 1906, and it was not opened to visitors until 1920.

The funniest thing about the place remains that the rock drew an entire continent without intending to, and then waited thousands of years for anyone to pay attention to what it had drawn.