Teen's Argument With His Parents Led Him To Spend Six Years Digging A Bunker

The boy is clearly frustrated as he smashes his way into the hard earth. The pickaxe – his grandpa’s – flies into the ground, and before long, Andrés has made himself quite a hole. You might have thought that once the teenager had worked off his anger, he’d stop. Alas, you’d be wrong!

These days Andrés is an actor, but back when the hole digging began, he was just like any other teenager in Spain. Sure, the Spaniard has a bit more imagination than some. But otherwise, he was the same as any boy in La Romana – the village in the Alicante region where the family lived.

So, what led Andrés to dig a hole in the garden? Well, he told the website LADbible in May 2021, “My parents wanted me to change clothes to go to the village. But I wanted to wear the tracksuit that I liked to wear at home so I could mess around in the village.”

But the boy’s parents had other ideas. Andrés continued, “They told me I could not go out dressed like this, and I said, ‘No worries, I can entertain myself,’ and I went to the back of the property and started to dig a hole.” We suspect that this calm retelling may be missing a fair bit of shouting and foot-stamping!

The youngster told Insider in May 2021 that he “was an angry teenager with a pickaxe.” But Andrés didn’t just work his fury out with a few hacks at the ground. No, he had more excavating in mind. The Spaniard continued, “After I started digging, I came back every afternoon for three years to continue digging that hole.”

Yes, Andrés made it into something of a hobby – unwinding when he came home from school by digging. Although the fight with his parents had sparked this new pastime in March 2015, he’d been thinking of doing something similar for some time. Andrés told Insider, “I was bored and alone in my neighborhood and I wanted to do something athletic.”

The budding actor described his youth to MailOnline in June 2021, saying, “I have always liked to build little huts. I live in the countryside, and often when I found abandoned wood there, I would build a nice house. I was a kid with a lot of imagination.”

It’s fair to say, though, that Andrés may not have imagined where his new hobby would take him. He’d previously imagined himself up in the air, as he told MailOnline. But now his focus was in the other direction. Andrés told the website, “The last evolution was the underground hut.”

Huts were not on the agenda when Andrés began digging, mind you. At first, he’d wanted nothing more than to dig a pit with no bottom. The young man told Insider, “For the first three years, I just wanted to see how deep a hole I could dig.” So, he relentlessly kept digging deeper, and deeper.

Even such a determined excavator has a limit to his powers, though. So, after that three years, Insider notes that Andrés brought in buddy Andrieu to assist. The latter proved a great help, and it wasn’t just because he put his back into the work. No, Andrieu also had a pneumatic drill that he was willing to devote to the enterprise.

But the addition of the excavating equipment didn’t mean that the two would be slacking off. No, they dug all the more after having the tool. Andrés and Andrieu scraped out an ever-bigger hole, and they stuck to it for as long as 14 hours each week, according to MailOnline. All this from a dispute over clothing!

When Andrieu first turned up, the pit was 5 feet deep, Insider notes. Not bad for three years’ work, but the drill made the going much easier. After a year of using it, the two youngsters had increased the depth to 11 feet. But Andrés didn’t stop thinking of ways to improve the process of excavating.

Naturally, digging the hole involved a great deal of work for Andrés. Not the least of it was getting dirt out of the hole. To do that, the then-teenager had to carry off what he’d dug out in buckets. And moving the amount of soil that Andrés had excavated one bucket at a time was tough going.

So, it’s perhaps not a surprise that Andrés started to think about ways to make moving the dirt easier. After some study, he came up with a new idea for that task, according to MailOnline. The actor set up a system of pulleys to help lift out the soil. And with that innovation, work continued on making a massive hole.

Now, of course, if you dig out enough of a hole, there are other problems. And Andrés wasn’t just digging downwards, he was actually scooping out something of a cavern! That made collapsing walls and roof a potential problem. So, the youngster stayed the ceiling with columns and put arches into the area where he entered the cavern.

In fact, the digging had taken on the form of a sort of complex. But although it was big – and had taken Andrés years to excavate – the project hadn’t cost him much beyond elbow grease. The truth is, he’d only had to spend about $60 on the hole, according to MailOnline. That surprised him because Andrés had thought the materials he’d need would be much more expensive.

If Andrés had a design for his cave in mind, he needed to adapt it somewhat. That’s because stones turned up that the actor had to mold the cave around. He told U.K. tabloid the Daily Mirror in May 2021, “Sometimes, I came across a big stone, and it could be frustrating after hours of digging that I had done almost nothing.”

Still, stones didn’t put Andrés off – nor did the lack of air underground. He told MailOnline, “It’s great, I have everything I need. It can be tiring to work here as it is wet and there is not much air going around, but I have found my own motivation to keep on digging every day.”

So, six years after Andrés had an argument over his tracksuit, he was still digging out a hole. Except now it was a system of caves – maybe you could even call it a bunker! Each day, he’d spend three hours down in what was now a complex – making it ever more complicated.

What might amaze you is that Andrés wasn’t just digging out a space underground. He eventually actually began turning it into a place that he could live in! Yes, his hole in the ground had developed into what now resembled an apartment, heating system and bed included.

But what use is an apartment under the ground? Well, for Andrés, it’s a home from home. The youngster doesn’t just spend time digging it out. He now passes as much as five hours daily taking it easy in his man cave. According to Insider, Andrés even has WiFi: the actor put in a system so that he could get reception underground.

And WiFi isn’t the only mod con this pad sports. No, there are also pipes to bring in heat on a cold night and a rack to hang up coats. They both sit in the first room that you come across when you descend the steps into the cave system. Though this is only the hallway.

When you move into the next room, Insider notes, you find a music system and an area where visitors can sit and listen. Yet right in the middle is something curious. Andrés explained to the publication what it is, saying, “In the center of that room, there’s an oven.” You could imagine that it gets pretty toasty under the ground.

But if you’re imagining some dank hole, you need to rethink. It’s actually surprisingly cozy! The system of rooms looks well built: you wouldn’t fear a cave-in at all. There even looks to be some brickwork in some of the walls! If you didn’t know better, you might take this for a rough-but-serviceable home.

Surely it’s a lonely business, though, creating your own real man cave? Well, it would be, but Andrés has friends who take an interest in the work, and they think what he’s built is awesome. The up-and-coming actor told Insider, “They come every week to see any improvements or to simply enjoy a beer down there.”

And it’s not such a bad place to hang out, either. When it’s a hot day outside – and Spain often sees warm weather, of course – it’s lovely and cool down in the cave. The temperature sticks at 68 no matter what it’s like above ground, according to MailOnline. The only downside is that there’s some flooding when it rains heavily.

Well, there’s the wet – and spiders. Sometimes, a creepy crawly will sneak into Andrés’ area. He doesn’t mind, though. The Spaniard told MailOnline, “I do not have problems with them, if I have destroyed their house, I let them build it in a new place in the wall, it’s no problem.”

And Andrés doesn’t let the odd snail prevent him from taking a nap in his cave, either. For that, the actor has a bed which he’s built in. And the lockdown of 2020-21 proved a good time for his work. He wrote in a tweet, “The room takes shape when the pandemic hits. A good 4 meters-squared of tranquility 4 meters underground. Worth it.”

Andrés was pretty proud of his efforts, and he ended up posting videos of the cave system online. And one of the viewers was his mom, who apparently hadn’t previously taken a look. Though when the matriarch did, she was not impressed! Andrés told MailOnline, “She came down and told me that it was smaller than it seemed in videos.”

Not that Andrés’ parents are particularly thrilled with the work. He told Insider, “Whenever I finish a room, they ask if I’m done already.” But even if mom and dad do have qualms, they seem content to allow him to dig up their back yard. Well, at least it’s keeping him busy!

Andrés isn’t planning on stopping, even though his cave is now quite impressive. It’s like a two-room apartment with built-in heating. There’s plenty of shelf space, and he can seat four when his friends come to visit, according to Insider. Overall, it’s a pretty impressive given that Andrés started with no more than a few pickaxe blows when he was letting off steam.

Now, all of that sounds like something that might interest the authorities. And when video of the cave system went viral, that’s exactly what happened. The environmental protection agency noticed, and it wanted to know just what he’d been building. So, an inspector came round to his parents’ house to take a look and find out.

Well, it’s fair to say the environment protection people were puzzled. That’s because they didn’t have any definition that they could put the cave under. It wasn’t a basement – not even really attached to the house. And it wasn’t an extension of the building, nor was it used to store anything.

Andrés explained the predicament to MailOnline. He said, “As I am the first person in Spain doing something like this, when the Civil Guard arrived there was not a specific report for that. It was not a basement – neither was it a storehouse – it was only a well-built underground hut.”

Though the project is not completed, and Andrés has a scheme for expansion. After all, he began with the plan simply to build a bottomless pit – a task that he didn’t expect to finish. The actor explained to Insider, “What hooked me on the project was that it is never-ending. I think I’ll probably add a jaccuzzi next.”

Andrés doesn’t mind that he’s spent so much time on his cave. He told Insider, “It’s been a long and rough adventure but, in the end, I love what I’ve achieved.” And the Spaniard has nothing but fond thoughts about his work. He continued, “All of the bad memories have disappeared.”

Interestingly, Andrés is not the only man who has carved his own space out of the ground. In Sichuan, China, a man decided to claw his home out of the side of a mountain. Hu Ge created his own cave – just like Andrés – and then gave it all the conveniences of home. And it’s amazing, although you could argue that it’s not wholly underground.

Meanwhile, in New Mexico, one man is creating his own caves by digging out the sandstone of the hills. Ra Paulette has art in mind: the American sculpts areas that he digs out into so-called “wilderness shrines.” And he’s been at it for a quarter-century at the time of writing, which leaves Andrés with a long way to go!

Perhaps there’s something for Andrés to aim for, then. We’re not sure whether he can take on a sandstone sculpture, but his apartment underground could grow. It’s already something quite special. In another six years, perhaps the bunker that emerged out of a childhood tantrum might have swollen into an underground palace!