The Nerja Caves
In January 1959, the month the USSR launched the first spacecraft ever to leave Earth’s gravity, in a small village near Nerja, twelve miles from where we are, five schoolboys were heading in the other direction, their curiosity piqued by the sight of hundreds of bats flying in and out of a small hole in a cave in which they often played.
Stretching for almost three miles and now one of Spain’s major tourist attractions, they’d discovered the Nerja caves, which research suggests have received more prehistoric visits than any other in Europe, and for around 41,000 years. The hole into which they’d wriggled revealed a cavernous space known now as the Cataclysm Chamber, which has an immense 45 metre column formed by the merging of a stalagmite and stalactite. It holds the Guinness World Record as the largest in the world.
We went there today and it’s impossible to do justice to the enormous, awe-inspiring magnificence of the numerous chambers that lie within, into which you could fit stacked cathedrals and still have room for more. Though formed by nature over millions of years the whole place does have a cathedral-like quality, but one viewed through the mind-altering prism of a dream or perhaps a hallucinatory drug.
Walking around its vast and ever-changing interior is, quite literally, a jaw dropping experience. All who enter wander around in a trance-like state, gazing at the Gaudi-like formations of stalactites that hang from the high ceilings like gigantic chandeliers and stalagmites that reach up from the floors, some resembling cauliflower or broccoli stems and others fantastical vegetation from a sci-fi dreamworld. Gaudi wouldn’t have seen them because he died before the caves were discovered but, as some of the pictures below show, you’d think he might have called by and taken inspiration there for the magnificent La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona.
Words can’t do it justice and nor can pictures, but here are a few.
Wow that does look unreal and almost unbelievable- what an experience x
It was breathtakingly spectacular!
Fantastic! Even the more so because a few years back, we had a good friend who was living in Nerja and we went to see her a couple of times but had no idea about this cave. Never seen so many stalagmites, stalactites, and helicitites.
Yep – a bit more going on there than in Sweetwater’s!
Ahhh Nerja – yes the sangria, the beach, pétanque…I remember it vaguely in a kind of semi-drunken hung over kind of way – I think we went to the caves – I remember being handed a fuzzy, hastily pre-framed Polaroid as we exited and a young girl smiling asking for a few pesetas (it was well before the Euro).
Yes, your picture’s still up at the entrance with a request for info on your whereabouts. Despite the reward, we kept quiet.