Psilocybin · Species
Psilocybe hispanica
Guzmán, 2000
A small, dung-loving psilocybin mushroom of the high Pyrenees — and the species proposed as the one painted, six thousand years ago, on a Spanish rock wall.
Identification, in outline
A small brown Psilocybe with a conic-to-convex cap seldom more than a centimetre across, a thin stem, and the genus’s habit of bruising bluish where handled. It was described by Gastón Guzmán in 2000 from material collected near Huesca in the Spanish Pyrenees in 1995, and placed in the section Semilanceata alongside the liberty cap. Descriptive record only; no gathering guidance.
Ecology and habitat
P. hispanica is coprophilous — a dung-lover. It fruits on horse dung in the open grazed pastures of the high Pyrenees, between roughly 1,700 and 2,300 metres, sometimes in dense clusters from a single dropping. Its known range is small: the mountains of northern Spain, chiefly Aragón, and across the border into south-western France. Within that range it is reported as locally common.
The Selva Pascuala question
What lifts this obscure alpine mushroom into the archive is a wall. The Selva Pascuala mural at Villar del Humo, in eastern Spain, is perhaps six thousand years old; beside a bull runs a row of small, bell-capped, stalked figures. In 2011 Brian Akers and colleagues argued that these depict P. hispanica — which would make the mural a rare prehistoric European record of a psilocybin species. The reading is suggestive and hotly contested: the painted forms are tiny, weathered, and schematic, and resemblance is not depiction. It is set out in full in the debate on prehistoric European mushrooms.
Active compounds
The species is reported to contain psilocybin, the tryptamine common to its genus. It has not been studied in the detail lavished on the famous Mexican species.
Toxicity and safety
As with every small brown Psilocybe, the real hazard is misidentification: dangerously toxic little mushrooms share these habitats, and coprophilous ground in particular hosts other genera entirely. Psilocybin is a controlled substance across the species’ European range.
The record
What remains uncertain
- The only cultural claim attached to this species — that it is the mushroom depicted at Selva Pascuala — is contested, and a painting is not proof of use (see the debate).
Sources & editorial record
Sources & further reading
Gastón Guzmán (2000). New species and new records of Psilocybe from Spain, the U.S.A. and Mexico, and a new case of poisoning by Psilocybe barrerae. Documents Mycologiques 29 (116): 41–52.
The original description of Psilocybe hispanica, a psilocybin species of the high Pyrenees, from material collected near Huesca (northern Spain) in 1995 — later proposed as the mushroom depicted in the Selva Pascuala mural.
Brian P. Akers & and colleagues (2011). A prehistoric mural in Spain depicting neurotropic Psilocybe mushrooms? (Selva Pascuala). Economic Botany 65(2).
Argues that a row of bell-shaped figures in the Selva Pascuala mural (Villar del Humo, Spain) depicts Psilocybe hispanica; the identification is debated.
Editorial record
Corrections history
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Last reviewed
A cultural and historical record — not a foraging, cultivation, or consumption guide.