The Most Beautiful Caves in the World

86 places in 40 countries · updated 14 October 2026

1. 01 Cave of Altamira

   Cueva de Altamira

   Spain · 25.7 km from Santander43.383° N 4.117° W

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   The Cave of Altamira, near Santillana del Mar in Cantabria, holds some of the finest Palaeolithic art in the world, and no other cave in northern Spain has such complex and crowded painting. The cave is about 270 m long, a series of passages in the limestone of Mount Vispieres. People lived at its mouth during the Solutrean and Magdalenian periods, until a rockfall sealed the entrance about 13,000 years ago and preserved everything inside. Uranium-thorium dating shows that painting went on for more than 10,000 years, and some red signs are around 36,000 years old. Altamira is the key site of the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Palaeolithic cave art in northern Spain.

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2. 02 Caves of Hercules

   Morocco · 12.1 km from Tangier35.760° N 5.939° W

   

   The Caves of Hercules sit on Cape Spartel, the headland where the Atlantic meets the entrance to the Strait of Gibraltar, about 14 km west of Tangier. The complex is part natural cavern and part quarry: over a long period Berber workers cut round millstones out of the walls, and the circular scars they left, along with the enlarged chambers, are still clearly visible. The site is known to have been inhabited by Neolithic people.

   Did you know? In 1986 the ashes of the artist and writer Brion Gysin, a pioneer of the cut-up technique, were scattered in the caves.

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3. 03 Son Doong Cave

   Vietnam · 33.3 km from Đồng Hới17.457° N 106.288° E

   

   Hang Sơn Đoòng, in the karst of Phong Nha–Kẻ Bàng National Park near the Laos border, holds the largest known cave passage on Earth. The main passage runs for more than 5 km, reaches about 200 metres in height and 150 metres in width, and its volume was measured at about 38.5 million cubic metres; its cross-section is thought to be roughly twice that of the next-largest passage, Deer Cave in Malaysian Borneo. The cave formed in limestone of Carboniferous–Permian age and is believed to be between two and five million years old. Its name means roughly "cave of the mountain behind Đoòng", after a nearby Vân Kiều village.

   Did you know? In places the passage is so vast that a Boeing 747 could fly through without its wings touching the walls.

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4. 04 Blue Grotto, Malta

   Malta · 10.2 km from Valletta35.821° N 14.457° E

   

   Malta's Blue Grotto is not a single cave but a cluster of sea caverns cut into the limestone cliffs of the island's southern coast, just beyond the small fishing inlet of Wied iż-Żurrieq. Maltese call the main cavern Taħt il-Ħnejja, "under the arch", after the monumental rock arch at its entrance, and the name says much about the place: the sea has carved a gateway tall enough to frame the sky, and behind it a chain of chambers that can only be entered from the water.

   Did you know? The English name is said to come from a British soldier who thought the caves deserved the name of Capri's famous Grotta Azzurra.

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5. 05 Cueva de las Manos

   Argentina47.150° S 70.667° W

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   Most of the hand images at Cueva de las Manos weren't painted with a brush — they're negative stencils, made by pressing a hand flat against the rock and blowing pigment around it through a hollow bone or reed pipe, leaving a silhouette rather than a filled-in shape. Look closely and the sizes vary enough to suggest whole families took part, including hands small enough to have belonged to children, layered onto the same rock faces over an enormous span of time: the oldest stencils are estimated at up to roughly 9,300 years old, with some evidence of use going back even further.

   Did you know? Of the hands that can be identified, 829 are left hands and only 31 right, suggesting most painters held the spray pipe in their right hand.

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6. 06 Padirac Cave

   Gouffre de Padirac

   France · 36.7 km from Brive-la-Gaillarde44.858° N 1.750° E

   

   The Gouffre de Padirac opens in the Jurassic limestone of the Causse de Gramat, in the Lot department of southwestern France, as a nearly circular shaft about 35 metres across and 103 metres deep. It was once a closed underground chamber; at some unknown moment its roof collapsed, leaving an open well that local people long associated with the devil. At the bottom flows an underground river that has been carving its way through the plateau for one to two million years, part of a karst network of which more than 58 km had been mapped by 2025.

   Did you know? In 1948 cave diver Guy de Lavaur explored the Montvalent spring in a wetsuit his wife made by gluing foam rubber onto his old-fashioned bathing costume.

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7. 07 Jenolan Caves

   Australia · 30.4 km from Katoomba33.821° S 150.021° E

   

   The Jenolan Caves sit in a steep limestone valley on the western side of the Blue Mountains, inside the Jenolan Karst Conservation Reserve. Their age is what sets them apart: potassium–argon measurements on clay trapped in the passages gave about 340 million years, which makes Jenolan the oldest known and dated open cave system on Earth. The Jenolan River runs underground through part of the complex, and the mapped network now exceeds 40 kilometres of passages on several levels, with more than 300 entrances. The bedrock is packed with Silurian marine fossils, and some of the calcite decoration is almost pure white.

   Did you know? In 1968 the Orient Cave became the first cave in the world to be cleaned, after soot from a coal boiler and mud had blackened its formations.

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8. 08 Mogao Caves

   People's Republic of China · 16.9 km from Dunhuang40.037° N 94.804° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   The Mogao Caves are among the richest treasure houses of Buddhist art anywhere. For roughly a thousand years, from the fourth century to the fourteenth, monks, merchants and officials cut shrines into a cliff face on the edge of the desert near Dunhuang, an oasis town on the Silk Road where traders and pilgrims prepared for, or recovered from, the crossing of the Gobi and Taklamakan. Tradition credits the first cave, in 366, to a monk named Le Zun.

   Did you know? Aurel Stein left in 1907 with about 7,000 complete manuscripts and 6,000 fragments, paying only about £130.

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9. 09 Škocjan Caves

   Škocjanske jame

   Slovenia · 15.3 km from Trieste45.665° N 13.995° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage
   • UNESCO natural beauty

   

   At Škocjan the Reka River, after some 55 km on the surface and a final four-kilometre gorge, runs up against a limestone wall and disappears underground. What it has carved beneath the Karst plateau is not a pretty grotto but one of the largest underground canyons known: the stretch called Šumeča jama, the Murmuring Cave, is about 3.5 km long, 10 to 60 metres wide and in places well over 100 metres high. Where the gorge widens it forms chambers, and the largest, Martel's Chamber, is 308 metres long, up to 123 metres wide and 146 metres high at the top of its vault, with a volume of about 2.2 million cubic metres. The river then flows on for 34 km out of sight and resurfaces at the springs of the Timavo near the Adriatic coast. The caves were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1986.

   Did you know? The underground path crosses the gorge on Cerkvenik Bridge, which hangs about 50 metres above the roaring Reka.

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10. 10 Cueva de los Verdes

    Spain · 23.3 km from Arrecife29.161° N 13.439° W

    

    The Cueva de los Verdes is a lava tube in the north of Lanzarote, a tunnel left behind when rivers of molten rock from the La Corona volcano flowed towards the sea. As the surface of the flow cooled and hardened into a crust, the lava beneath kept moving and eventually drained away, leaving a hollow passage. The whole system runs for more than seven kilometres from the volcano to the coast and continues under the sea as the Túnel de la Atlántida; in about twenty places the roof has collapsed, forming the openings the islanders call jameos.

    Did you know? The tube continues for about 1.5 kilometres beneath the sea, because it formed when sea level was some 80 metres lower than today.

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11. 11 Blue Grotto, Capri

    Grotta Azzurra

    Italy · 31.4 km from Naples40.561° N 14.205° E

    

    The Blue Grotto is a sea cave on the coast of Capri that seems to be lit from below. Its entrance is a hole in the cliff barely 2 m wide and about 1 m high at low tide, but inside it opens into a chamber some 60 m long and 25 m wide. The light enters mostly through a much larger opening under the water; as it passes through the sea, the red part of the spectrum is absorbed, and the cavern fills with an intense, electric blue that seems to glow from the water itself. A hand dipped in the water shines pale silver, an effect of tiny bubbles clinging to the skin.

    Did you know? In the 18th century islanders called the cave Gradola, and sailors steered clear of it out of fear of witches and monsters.

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12. 12 Cave of the Crystals

    Cueva de los cristales

    Mexico · 38.7 km from Delicias27.851° N 105.496° W

    

    Some 300 metres below the mining town of Naica in Chihuahua, miners cutting a new tunnel for the silver, zinc and lead workings of Industrias Peñoles broke into a chamber in April 2000 that turned out to hold some of the largest natural crystals ever recorded. The horseshoe-shaped cavity in limestone, roughly 109 metres long, is crossed by translucent beams of selenite, a form of gypsum; the biggest measures about 11.4 metres and is estimated to weigh around 12 tonnes. A smaller chamber higher up in the same mine, the Cave of Swords at about 120 metres depth, had been found as early as 1910, but its crystals reach only about a metre.

    Did you know? Measured in the laboratory, the giant crystals grow by less than half a nanometre a year, the slowest crystal growth rate ever directly measured.

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13. 13 Fingal's Cave

    United Kingdom56.431° N 6.341° W

    

    The columns inside this cave on the uninhabited island of Staffa were poured, geologically speaking, at the same moment as the more famous ones across the water in Ireland. Around 60 million years ago, a single vast lava flow cooled slowly enough that it cracked into regular hexagonal columns as it contracted — the same process, the same flow, on both sides of what's now open sea. The Giant's Causeway and this cave are, quite literally, two exposed cross-sections of one geological event.

    Did you know? In Scottish Gaelic the cave is called An Uaimh Bhinn, the melodious cave, a name earned by the sound of the sea inside it.

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14. 14 Eisriesenwelt

    Austria · 36 km from Salzburg47.503° N 13.190° E

    

    In 1879, a Salzburg naturalist named Anton von Posselt-Czorich became the first documented person to enter this cave above the Salzach valley. He got about 200 metres in, by torchlight, before turning back — not because the passage stopped, but because what lay ahead unsettled him enough that he wrote of fearing he'd found an entrance to the underworld. It's easy to see why: the cave breathes. Cold, dense winter air sinks into the mountain and pools in its vast chambers, and when warmer, moisture-laden air meets it in spring and summer, that moisture freezes on contact — not from an ancient glacier dragged inside, but built up season after season, meltwater by meltwater, for roughly a thousand years in the oldest layers.

    Did you know? Explorer Alexander von Mörk was the first to pass the Sturmsee, a then-flooded passage, and found beyond it the vast hall later named after him.

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15. 15 Algar do Carvão

    Portugal · 8.7 km from Angra do Heroísmo38.729° N 27.214° W

    

    Algar do Carvão is one of the rare places on Earth where you can walk down inside the throat of a volcano. In the middle of the island of Terceira, among pastures and cedar scrub, a dark opening about 15 by 20 metres leads into a vertical chimney that drops some 90 metres to a pool of rainwater. Most volcanic vents seal themselves with collapsed rock or solidified lava; this one was left open when the magma drained back down after an eruption, leaving a hollow shaft and a pair of vaulted chambers that can be visited.

    Did you know? The name means roughly 'Coal Pit', although there is no coal here: carvão refers to the blackened, sooty-looking rock.

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16. 16 Tam Cốc-Bích Động

    Vietnam · 7.3 km from Ninh Bình20.218° N 105.916° E

    

    Tam Cốc means "three caves", and the name describes the whole experience: a slow boat ride along the Ngô Đồng River, which has cut three tunnels straight through the limestone towers of Ninh Bình. The area forms part of the Tràng An Scenic Landscape Complex, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and its tower karst rising from flooded rice fields has earned it the nickname "Hạ Long Bay on land". The first tunnel, Hang Cả, runs 127 m through a large massif behind a mouth more than 20 m wide, with stalactites hanging from its roof. Hang Hai, about a kilometre further on, is 60 m long, and Hang Ba, the lowest and shortest at about 50 m, lies close behind it. The route ends near a temple to Thần Nông, the mythical founder of rice farming.

    Did you know? Parts of the 2017 film Kong: Skull Island were shot among the karst towers of Tam Cốc, with filming in Ninh Bình starting in February 2016.

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17. 17 Jeita Grotto

    Lebanon · 14.5 km from Beirut33.944° N 35.641° E

    

    In the valley of the Nahr al-Kalb, the Dog River, about 18 km north of Beirut, the limestone of Mount Lebanon hides one of the most spectacular cave systems of the Middle East. Jeita Grotto is really two caves, one above the other, explored over a combined length of nearly nine kilometres. The lower one is the channel of an underground river – the main source of the Nahr al-Kalb and of drinking water for much of Beirut. The upper one, sixty metres higher, is dry and crowded with stone.

    Did you know? The upper galleries stretch for about 2.1 km, while the lower river cave has been explored for about 6.2 km.

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18. 18 Lascaux Cave

    Grotte de Lascaux

    France · 30.5 km from Brive-la-Gaillarde45.054° N 1.171° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Lascaux holds the most celebrated Ice Age paintings in the world. The cave opens into a wooded hillside above the Vézère valley near Montignac in the Dordogne, and its walls and ceilings carry some six hundred painted figures and around fifteen hundred engravings, made by Magdalenian hunters roughly 17,000 to 22,000 years ago. The animals — aurochs, horses, deer, bison and big cats — are drawn with astonishing confidence, using the bulges and hollows of the rock to give them volume and movement.

    Did you know? Horses dominate the cave: of about 605 precisely identified animals, 364 are equines, while aurochs and bison each make up only about 4 to 5 percent.

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19. 19 Pak Ou Caves

    Laos · 19.6 km from Luang Prabang20.049° N 102.210° E

    

    The Pak Ou Caves are two openings in a cliff on the west bank of the Mekong, close to where the Ou River flows into it. The name means "mouth of the Ou". Tham Ting, the lower cave, sits just above the water line. Tham Theung, the upper cave, lies higher up the rock face. Both are about 25 km upstream from Luang Prabang and are one of the best-known excursions from the town.

    Did you know? A 2018 survey counted more than 50 rock art elements at the site, mostly paintings, some likely made long before Buddhism reached the region.

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20. 20 Yungang Grottoes

    People's Republic of China · 15.3 km from Datong40.110° N 113.122° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Construction began under Emperor Wencheng in the 450s CE, right after a period of state persecution of Buddhism had ended, and the earliest group — the so-called Tanyao Five Caves, named for the monk who oversaw them — deliberately modelled their colossal Buddha statues on the faces of the Northern Wei emperors themselves. This wasn't incidental symbolism: carving an emperor's likeness into a Buddha fused religious authority with imperial legitimacy, in stone, for anyone who visited to see.

    Did you know? The largest figure at Yungang, the seated Buddha of Cave 5, is about 17 metres tall, while the smallest carved figures measure only about 2 centimetres.

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21. 21 Paradise Cave (Thiên Đường)

    Vietnam17.520° N 106.223° E

    

    Paradise Cave — Động Thiên Đường in Vietnamese — is a limestone cave in the hills of Phong Nha–Kẻ Bàng National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in central Vietnam. It was found by a local man in 2005, and British cavers of the British Cave Research Association began exploring it the same year. They went on to survey a total of about 31 km of passages, more than Phong Nha Cave, until then considered the longest in the park, and gave it the name Paradise.

    Did you know? With roughly 31 km of surveyed passages, Paradise Cave is often described as the longest dry cave in Asia.

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22. 22 Rock Shelters of Bhimbetka

    India22.939° N 77.614° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    On a forested ridge at the southern edge of the Vindhya Range, weathered sandstone outcrops form hundreds of overhangs, and on the walls of roughly four hundred of them people painted for thousands of years. Bhimbetka holds one of the longest records of human presence in South Asia: the shelters were occupied from more than 100,000 years ago, through the Acheulean and later Stone Age phases, and the oldest of the paintings are generally placed in the Mesolithic, around 10,000 BCE, with some scholars arguing for an even earlier start. Later layers continue into historic and medieval times, so a single rock face can carry images made thousands of years apart.

    Did you know? Fossils of the ancient animal Dickinsonia reported from Bhimbetka caused excitement among geologists until closer study showed they were the decayed remains of a beehive.

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23. 23 Cueva de Nerja

    Spain36.762° N 3.845° W

    

    The Cave of Nerja is one of the great show caves of Europe: a system of chambers almost 5 km long in the marble hills above the Costa del Sol, formed as water dissolved the rock over some five million years. Its Hall of the Cataclysm, more than 100 metres long, is dominated by a single enormous column about 32 metres high and 13 by 7 metres at its base, often described as the largest in the world. Another chamber forms a natural amphitheatre where concerts and dance festivals are staged, with about 100 permanent seats.

    Did you know? In a corner of the Hall of the Cataclysm, fluted columns ring with different notes when struck, and some seem to have been shaped by prehistoric people to tune them.

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24. 24 Actun Tunichil Muknal

    Belize · 18.3 km from Belmopan17.114° N 88.862° W

    

    Deep inside a river cave in the forests of western Belize, the bones of the ancient Maya lie where they were left more than a thousand years ago, slowly sealed to the rock by sparkling mineral crusts. Actun Tunichil Muknal, the Cave of the Crystal Sepulchre, is known locally simply as ATM. It is both a natural wonder, a long passage of flowing water and dripstone, and one of the most vivid Maya ritual sites anywhere.

    Did you know? The cave was first explored in the 1980s by the geomorphologist Thomas Miller, and archaeologists excavated it between 1993 and 1998.

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25. 25 Phraya Nakhon Cave

    Thailand12.197° N 100.011° E

    

    Phraya Nakhon Cave, in Khao Sam Roi Yot National Park on Thailand's Gulf coast, is famous for a single image: a small royal pavilion standing in a shaft of sunlight that falls through a collapsed section of the cave roof. The Kuha Karuhas Pavilion, a four-gabled structure in red and gold built by Bangkok craftsmen in 1890 for King Rama V's visit, sits beneath this natural skylight, and at certain times of day the light pours straight onto it. It has become one of the most photographed sights in the country and appears on the emblem of Prachuap Khiri Khan province.

    Did you know? A natural stone bridge spans the top of the cave's skylight, nicknamed the Death Bridge because wild animals have fallen from it to their deaths.

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26. 26 Neptune's Grotto

    Grotte di Nettuno

    Italy · 39.2 km from Sassari40.565° N 8.160° E

    

    Neptune's Grotto opens at the foot of Capo Caccia, a sheer headland on the coast near Alghero. Its mouth sits barely a metre above the Mediterranean under cliffs about 110 metres high, and that position decides everything about a visit: the cave can only be entered when the sea is calm. Local fishermen are said to have found it in the 18th century, and it has drawn travellers ever since — King Charles Albert of Sardinia came three times, in 1829, 1841 and 1843, and marble plaques inside record his visits. The Victorian travel writer John Warren Tyndale, by contrast, spent a long stay in Alghero and never managed to get in.

    Did you know? The cave is named after Neptune, the Roman god of the sea, and is known in the Catalan spoken in Alghero as Cova de Neptú.

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27. 27 Caves of Gargas

    Grottes de Gargas

    France43.056° N 0.536° E

    

    The Caves of Gargas hold one of the most haunting sights in Ice Age art: walls crowded with the outlines of human hands. More than two hundred of them have been counted, stencilled in red ochre or black manganese by blowing pigment around a palm pressed flat against the rock. They belong to men and women and to children, even infants, and in nearly half of them the fingers stop short, as though missing their outer joints, while the thumb is always whole. Few painted caves anywhere hold so many.

    Did you know? Gargas holds more than 200 stencilled hands, one of the largest such groups in any Ice Age cave.

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28. 28 Prometheus Cave

    Georgia · 17.7 km from Kutaisi42.377° N 42.601° E

    

    Prometheus Cave, known locally as Kumistavi Cave, lies near Tskaltubo in the Imereti region of western Georgia, within the Sataplia–Tskaltubo karst massif. It has about 11 km of passages and 22 halls, of which six are open on a walkway of about 1.8 km. The cave is a small part of a much bigger system joined by an underground river, of which about 30 km has so far been explored.

    Did you know? The cave was found on 15 July 1983 by an expedition from the Vakhushti Bagrationi Institute of Geography in Tbilisi.

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29. 29 Macocha Gorge

    Macocha

    Czech Republic · 21.1 km from Brno49.373° N 16.730° E

    

    The Macocha Abyss is a collapsed sinkhole in the Moravian Karst, 138.5 metres deep to the surface of the lake at its bottom — the deepest chasm of its kind in Central Europe. It measures about 174 by 76 metres, wide enough for daylight to reach the floor, which puts it in the category of "light hole" abysses. Beneath the two lakes at the bottom, divers have followed flooded spaces to a total depth of about 187 metres. The underground Punkva River runs through it, and the abyss forms part of the Punkva Caves system.

    Did you know? Of the two lakes on the floor, the Upper Lake is about 11 metres deep and the Lower Lake at least 50 metres.

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30. 30 Frasassi Caves

    Grotte di Frasassi

    Italy43.401° N 12.963° E

    

    The Frasassi Caves lie inside the limestone of the Apennines near Genga, in the Marche. The first entrance was found by a farmer in 1948, and cavers from Jesi and Fabriano pushed further in during the 1950s and 1960s, but the discovery that made the name came on 25 September 1971, when a group of speleologists from Ancona led by Giancarlo Cappanera broke into the Grotta Grande del Vento, the Great Cave of the Wind. Its passages run for some 13 km, and the show cave opened to the public in 1974.

    Did you know? The caves were not cut by ordinary rainwater: they formed when hydrogen sulfide-rich groundwater met oxygenated water and produced sulfuric acid that eats limestone, a process still active today.

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