Press kit.

A Puerto Rican climber goes up a wall ropeless, over the sea, a few steps from Cueva del Indio in Arecibo, and checks what he was told about the name of that coast.

A 17-minute personal essay film. Ropeless climbing over the sea in Arecibo, a few steps from a cave with Taíno petroglyphs; two papers from 1515, and fifteen million years of stone beneath it all.

Held Up by the 15-Million-Year-Old Dead (Me sostengo de los muertos de hace 15 millones de años) is a 17-minute personal essay film by Gabriel J. Pérez Irizarry, shot at Cueva del Indio in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. A climber goes up a wall ropeless over the sea, a few steps from the Taíno petroglyphs, and checks what he was told about the name of that coast until he reaches two royal orders from 1515. Beneath the dune he climbs lies the limestone of a sea fifteen million years old. It premieres free on YouTube on October 21, 2026, in Spanish with English subtitles.

Gabriel J. Pérez Irizarry is a Puerto Rican climber and filmmaker. He wrote, directed and narrates Held Up by the 15-Million-Year-Old Dead, shot in Arecibo and self-funded.

Held Up by the 15-Million-Year-Old Dead (Gabriel J. Pérez Irizarry, Puerto Rico, 2026, 17 min)

Arecibo or Arasibo?

The film says Arasibo in the first act, the way the narrator was told it, and in the third it shows the two spellings in the 1515 papers: Areçabo in the original and Araçibo in the certified copy of 1521. The form with an s is Coll y Toste’s (1907), who wanted the Taíno word siba, “stone,” to show inside it. That ara means “people” appears in no Taíno source: that sentence was born on Wikipedia on October 7, 2021. The film doesn’t explain it: it shows both papers on screen, and that’s enough.

Is the rock really 15 million years old?

Not the one being climbed. The wall is an Ice Age dune turned to stone: sand of shells, corals and algae that the sea ground down in the Pleistocene and the wind piled up. Beneath that dune, holding up the whole coast, is the Miocene limestone — fifteen million years, the sea the megalodon swam in. That’s what the title is about: what holds, not what you touch.

Does it take a position on the access case?

No. The video mentions no law and no legal process. It’s about the place: the stone, memory and physical danger. The site’s context — the court sanction of August 2026 and September’s new stage — is in the press release, not in the film.