The Most Beautiful Caves in Europe

41 places in 17 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 Polychrome Ceiling of the main hall shows a herd of extinct steppe bison in red and black, together with horses, a large doe and possibly a boar. The painters used charcoal, ochre and haematite, thinning the pigments to create shading, and placed each animal so that the natural bulges of the rock became its shoulders and flanks, giving the figures a sculptural volume. Elsewhere in the cave there are older paintings: horses and goats, abstract signs, and outlines of hands made by blowing pigment around a hand held against the wall.

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2. 02 Blue Grotto, Malta

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

   

   The attraction is colour. In sunshine, light passes through the clear water and bounces back onto the cave walls and ceilings, so the rock itself seems to glow in shades of blue. Deeper in, some caverns turn a much darker blue, and beneath the surface the rocks show patches of orange, red and yellow from algae and marine life. Opposite the caves lies Filfla, a small uninhabited islet protected as a bird sanctuary, which gives the seascape its lonely silhouette.

   Did you know? The great arch at the entrance rises more than 40 metres above the sea.

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3. 03 Padirac Cave

   Gouffre de Padirac

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

   

   Early visitors went down in baskets on ropes without ever finding the way on. The river itself was discovered in July 1889 by the explorer Édouard-Alfred Martel, who returned the next day with a small boat and travelled about two kilometres along the river. In 1890 his team found a vast chamber, some 60 by 40 metres, whose vault rises more than 70 metres above a small pool. Martel set up a company to open the cave to the public; the first tourists came on 1 November 1898 and the official opening followed in April 1899.

   Did you know? Padirac is the second most visited cave in Europe, after Postojna in Slovenia.

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4. 04 Škocjan Caves

   Škocjanske jame

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

   • UNESCO World Heritage
   • UNESCO natural beauty

   

   The approach is part of the spectacle. Early in the Pleistocene the roof of the cave collapsed near the sinks, leaving two huge collapse dolines, Velika dolina up to 165 metres deep and Mala dolina about 120 metres deep, separated by a natural bridge of the original ceiling. The village of Škocjan, which gave the caves their name, sits on the rock between them. In the shaded depths of the dolines Alpine plants grow a short distance from Mediterranean species such as maidenhair fern, a rare pairing made possible by the cave's own microclimate. The canyon has also drawn people for a very long time.

   Did you know? High under the cave ceiling a plaque marks how far the floodwater rose on 2 September 1965.

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5. 05 Cueva de los Verdes

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

   

   For centuries the cave was a hiding place: islanders sheltered here from the Berber corsairs who periodically struck Lanzarote, and the name is said to come from a local family, the Verdes, who kept animals in it. In the 1960s the artist Jesús Soto prepared a path through about a kilometre of the tube and lit it with carefully placed lamps that pick out the textures of the rock — lava stalactites and the lines left on the walls by successive levels of the flow — and the cave opened to the public in 1964. It is run by the island's network of art, culture and tourism centres, alongside the nearby Jameos del Agua on the same tube.

   Did you know? Jesús Soto's design added not only lighting but ambient sound to shape the mood of the walk.

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6. 06 Blue Grotto, Capri

   Grotta Azzurra

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

   

   Getting inside is part of the experience. Visitors transfer to small rowing boats that take four people, lie back flat on the bottom, and the boatman pulls the boat through the low opening with a chain fixed to the rock, timing the swell. Entry is possible only when the sea is calm and the tide low; swimming inside is forbidden. Once through, the darkness of the vault and the glowing floor of water make for a few unforgettable minutes.

   Did you know? The fisherman who led August Kopisch and Ernst Fries into the grotto in 1826 was Angelo Ferraro.

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7. 07 Fingal's Cave

   United Kingdom56.431° N 6.341° W

   

   The name people know it by is younger than it sounds. The story of the giant Fionn mac Cumhaill building a causeway to Scotland is old Gaelic tradition, but ‘Fingal’ and the specific cave name came from James Macpherson's hugely popular 18th-century poetry cycle, published from 1760 onward, which claimed to translate ancient Gaelic epics but was substantially Macpherson's own literary invention layered onto real folklore.

   Did you know? The cave is about 20 metres high and runs some 75 metres into the island, though published depths vary.

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8. 08 Eisriesenwelt

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

   

   It took another cave explorer, Alexander von Mörk, to actually open the system up, starting around 1912 and continuing until 1920. Von Mörk didn't survive to see tourism take hold: he was killed in the First World War, and in keeping with a wish he'd made before dying, his ashes were interred inside the cave itself, in a chamber that still bears his name. Visitors on the standard route are handed carbide-style lamps in an echo of the original exploration lighting, before continuing on secured pathways.

   Did you know? In 1913 von Mörk, Erwin Angermayer and Hermann Rihl became the first to climb the Great Ice Wall, the steepest part of the frozen slope.

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9. 09 Algar do Carvão

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

   

   The descent begins through a tunnel cut in the 1960s and continues on a long stairway — more than three hundred steps — that winds down past walls of basalt, black obsidian and reddish iron oxides. Looking back up, the mouth of the chimney is framed by ferns and mosses hanging into the light, an image that has become one of the best known of the Azores. Lower down, the vaults are hung with milky-white stalactites and stalagmite-like crusts made not of limestone but of amorphous silica, deposited by water seeping through the volcanic rock. Silica formations on this scale are very unusual in caves anywhere, and they are the feature specialists come to see.

   Did you know? The eruption was dated from the charred trunk of a tree, probably an Azores juniper, engulfed by lava, to about 2,150 years ago.

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10. 10 Lascaux Cave

    Grotte de Lascaux

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

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The first chamber, the Hall of the Bulls, is dominated by a procession of great black aurochs, one of them about 5.2 metres long, the largest animal figure known in cave art. Beyond it, the narrow Axial Diverticulum carries cows and horses painted across its walls and ceiling. Deeper in, the Apse is covered with more than a thousand engravings, and at the bottom of a shaft lies the most enigmatic image of all: a stick-like man with a bird's head, the only human figure in the cave.

    Did you know? Although reindeer were the artists' main food, only one reindeer appears in the whole cave, and there are no fish, plants or landscapes at all.

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11. 11 Cueva de Nerja

    Spain36.762° N 3.845° W

    

    The cave was rediscovered on 12 January 1959 by five young men from Maro and Nerja who had gone to catch bats in a sinkhole known as La Mina. Feeling a draught of moist air, they returned the next day with tools, broke through two stalactites and crawled into a vast gallery, where they found skeletons lying beside pottery bowls. A new entrance for visitors was opened in 1960, the cave was declared a historic-artistic monument in 1961, and in 2006 it was listed as an archaeological zone. The Upper and New Galleries, discovered in 1960 and 1969, remain closed to the public.

    Did you know? The easy visitor entrance was found by tracing the thick root of a juniper down through the galleries, then blasting away a boulder that had sealed it for millennia.

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12. 12 Neptune's Grotto

    Grotte di Nettuno

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

    

    Inside, a lit walkway leads through a few hundred metres of a system estimated at around 4 km. The centrepiece is the Lamarmora Lake, a saltwater lake at sea level, roughly 100–120 metres long, with a stalagmite column rising from the water whose top holds cups of fresh drip water — the "holy-water font". Beyond it are the Palace Hall, where calcite columns reach about 9 metres and the vault rises to 18, and the Organ Hall, named for a great column whose flowstone ripples like organ pipes. The Hall of Ruins takes its name from the damage done by souvenir-hunters in the 1800s. Monk seals once used the cave; they have long since disappeared from this coast.

    Did you know? The Lamarmora Lake is roughly 9 metres deep and up to 25 metres wide, and a stalagmite formation nicknamed the Christmas Tree rises from its floor.

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13. 13 Caves of Gargas

    Grottes de Gargas

    France43.056° N 0.536° E

    

    What those shortened fingers mean has been argued over for more than a century. Early researchers wondered about ritual amputation, frostbite or disease; many prehistorians now think the painters simply bent some fingers down while the paint was sprayed, perhaps as a kind of sign language or code, though the purpose remains unknown. A splinter of bone wedged into a crack beside one of the hand panels has been radiocarbon dated to about 27,000 years ago, placing the cave's use in the Gravettian period, close in age to the oldest hands at Cosquer on the Mediterranean coast.

    Did you know? In nearly half of the hands the fingers appear shortened, while the thumb is always complete.

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14. 14 Prometheus Cave

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

    

    Georgian speleologists led by Jumber Jishkariani discovered and surveyed the cave in the early 1980s. Work to open it to tourists began in 1985. By 1989 a walking route of about a kilometre, stairs and a 150-metre exit tunnel had been built, and small groups were visiting under temporary lights. Then the Soviet Union collapsed and the money ran out. For years a local man guarded the empty cave against vandals, and a statue of him and his dog now stands at the entrance. The cave takes its name from the Greek myth that Prometheus was chained in these mountains.

    Did you know? Its original name, Kumistavi, comes from the village and the underground river that runs through the cave.

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15. 15 Macocha Gorge

    Macocha

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

    

    The name comes from the Czech word for stepmother. According to legend, which was first written down in 1793, a stepmother threw her stepson into the chasm; the boy survived by catching on the rock just below the edge, and the villagers who rescued him threw her in instead. The abyss is mentioned in documents from 1663, and the first person known to have reached the bottom was Lazar Schopper in 1723. Scientific descents followed from 1784, and the karst researcher Karel Absolon began a new era of exploration in 1901. The Punkva Caves were discovered in 1909, the bottom of the abyss was linked by a dry route in 1914, and the route along the underground river was opened in 1933.

    Did you know? The earliest written mention of the abyss, in 1663, came from Martin Alexander Vigsius, a monk of the Zábrdovice monastery.

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16. 16 Frasassi Caves

    Grotte di Frasassi

    Italy43.401° N 12.963° E

    

    What visitors walk into first is the Abisso Ancona, a single chamber roughly 180 by 120 metres in plan and close to 200 metres high — a space large enough that the lights barely reach its roof. Beyond it the cave is crowded with water-made shapes: the Sala delle Candeline takes its name from a field of slim white stalagmites that look like candles, the Sala dell'Infinito from the massive columns that seem to hold the ceiling up, and there are formations known as the organ pipes. Because the system is still wet, much of the stone is actively growing and glistens rather than looking dusty.

    Did you know? Slimy bacterial mats known as snottites hang from the deeper walls and are extremely acidic, with a pH between 0 and 1.

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17. 17 Blue Grotto, Biševo

    Modra špilja

    Croatia42.980° N 16.021° E

    

    The cave is small, which is part of its charm. Wave action carved it from the limestone of Biševo, in a cove called Balun. It is about 24 metres long, up to 15 metres high, with water 10–12 metres deep. For most of its history the only way in was to dive. Baron Eugen von Ransonet described and painted it in the 19th century, and on his suggestion a passage wide enough for a small rowing boat was cut in 1884 — 1.5 metres high and 2.5 metres wide. Visitors still go in that way today, in a small rowing boat.

    Did you know? Ransonnet sketched beneath the sea from a diving bell of sheet iron and thick glass, weighted with cannonballs, staying down for up to three hours.

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18. 18 Prohodna Cave

    Проходна

    Bulgaria43.177° N 24.073° E

    

    High in the ceiling of the central chamber are two openings of almost the same size and shape, worn through the rock by erosion. Seen from below they look uncannily like a pair of eyes staring down, and the formation is popularly called the Eyes of God. Daylight falls through them onto the cave floor, so the whole chamber is naturally lit. The image is one of the best-known in Bulgarian nature photography. It appears in the 1988 film Time of Violence, where a priest prays beneath the eyes, and dozens of other productions, including the American film The Way Back, have been shot here.

    Did you know? The waters of the Iskar once flowed through the cave; the river has since cut down and now runs well below its floor.

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19. 19 Chauvet Cave

    Grotte Chauvet

    France44.388° N 4.416° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    What sets Chauvet apart is not only its age but its daring. The painters chose animals that rarely appear in other Ice Age caves: cave lions, woolly rhinoceroses, bears, a leopard, a hyena, alongside horses, bison and mammoths, with well over a dozen species in all. They scraped the rock clean before working, so that figures stand out on a pale ground, and they used shading, layered outlines and the natural relief of the walls to give the animals volume and movement. Several panels read as scenes rather than catalogues: two rhinos clash horns, a pride of lions seems to stalk its prey, and a frieze of horse heads overlaps as if in motion.

    Did you know? UNESCO inscribed the cave on the World Heritage List in June 2014, twenty years after its discovery.

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20. 20 Devetashka cave

    Деветашка пещера

    Bulgaria · 17.2 km from Lovech43.233° N 24.887° E

    

    Beyond the hall the cave divides into two branches, one carrying a small stream and the other dry and warmer, with stalactites, stalagmites and small domes. Excavations since the 1950s have shown that people lived here almost continuously for tens of thousands of years, with the earliest traces dating back around 70,000 years to the Middle Palaeolithic; the cave is also one of Bulgaria's richest Neolithic sites, with finds from the 6th to 4th millennia BC, many from a chamber known as the Altar. In the 1950s the cave was used, less gloriously, as a store for oil, and the tanks stood near the entrance until early this century.

    Did you know? The cave's known passages total about 2.4 kilometres, and the air inside stays at about 10–11 °C with humidity above 90 per cent.

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21. 21 Les Combarelles

    Grotte des Combarelles I

    France44.944° N 1.042° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    What you see, lit at close range as you move along the corridor, is a crowded bestiary. Horses dominate, alone and in groups, but there are reindeer, ibex, mammoths, woolly rhinoceros, bears, big cats and a few bovids, often overlapping so that one animal's back becomes another's leg. The reindeer are the ones people remember: drawn with an observer's accuracy, some of them lower their heads as if to drink. Set apart from this realism are around fifty strange, schematic human-like figures and a scatter of signs, including the roof-shaped marks known as tectiforms, whose meaning is still argued over.

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22. 22 Cave of Niaux

    Grotte de Niaux

    France · 34.9 km from Andorra la Vella42.821° N 1.594° E

    

    The Salon Noir is a rotunda where Magdalenian artists drew animals in black outline, with charcoal and manganese oxide, using the swell of the rock to give them volume. Bison dominate. Across the cave as a whole the count runs to 54 bison, 29 horses and 15 ibex, plus red deer and even fish. The horses, with their shaggy manes, resemble the stocky Pottok ponies still living in the Basque Pyrenees. Some animals carry marks that look like arrows. There are also red and black dots and lines, alone or next to the animals, and the footprints of adults and children survive in about ten places on the floor. Radiocarbon dating of the charcoal in the Salon Noir gives about 13,000 years.

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23. 23 Dobšinská Ice Cave

    Dobšinská ľadová jaskyňa

    Slovakia48.868° N 20.304° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The cave was carved by the Hnilec in Middle Triassic limestone and was once connected to the neighbouring Stratenská cave. A roof collapse cut it off and left a sack-shaped cavity about 180 metres wide descending some 70 metres from a single opening. Heavy cold air flows in and settles there in winter, and water seeping in during spring freezes into floor ice, icefalls and columns. The floor ice reaches about 25 metres in thickness and is clearly layered, and estimates of the total volume run well above 100,000 cubic metres. The Great Hall, an ellipse about 72 by 42 metres, averages around −1 °C, and the biggest ice column is about 9 metres high.

    Did you know? Eugen Ruffinyi made the first descent on 15 June 1870 together with Gustáv Lang and Andrej Mega.

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24. 24 Aven Armand

    France44.221° N 3.357° E

    

    The stalactites overhead are small by comparison. Water passes quickly through the ceiling of the hall and leaves little calcite behind, so most of the deposit builds up on the floor instead, which explains why the chamber is dominated by growths rising from below. The cave opens into Jurassic limestone at an altitude of about 970 metres, and its total vertical range reaches 197 metres.

    Did you know? The temperature inside the main hall stays at around 12°C all year round.

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25. 25 Castellana Caves

    Grotte di Castellana

    Italy · 35.2 km from Bari40.876° N 17.149° E

    

    Two days later he went back down with a local laborer, Vito Matarrese, and the two worked roughly 300 meters into the system before a descending passage called the Serpent Corridor stopped them. They returned in March, pushed to 600 meters, and were halted again by another chasm; Anelli produced the first map of the caves that September. Matarrese kept exploring after Anelli moved on, and in 1939 found an entirely separate chamber on his own: the White Cave, whose pale alabaster formations are now considered the highlight of the whole complex.

    Did you know? The explored system runs for about 3 kilometres and reaches some 122 metres below the surface.

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26. 26 Font-de-Gaume cave

    Grotte de Font-de-Gaume

    France44.935° N 1.029° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The cave mouth was known to local people long before anyone noticed what lay inside. On 12 September 1901 the village schoolmaster Denis Peyrony, who days earlier had seen the engravings of nearby Les Combarelles with the prehistorian Henri Breuil, recognised the paintings for what they were. Breuil went on to copy the figures by hand, and his drawings made Font-de-Gaume one of the foundations of the study of Palaeolithic art at a time when many scholars still doubted that prehistoric people could paint.

    Did you know? The cave walls carry more than 80 bison, around 40 horses and over 20 mammoths.

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27. 27 Diros Caves (Vlychada)

    Σπήλαιο Γλυφάδα Διρού

    Greece36.638° N 22.380° E

    

    The main cave, known as Vlychada or Glyfada, is a horizontal karst system in limestone and the longest known cave in Greece, with about 15,400 metres mapped by 2007. Local people found it in 1923, and the speleologists Ioannis and Anna Petrocheilou began its systematic exploration in 1949; by the time Ioannis died in 1960, about 1,600 metres had been explored. It opened as a show cave in 1961, and divers and cavers have since kept extending the known passages, recording stalactites even at 71 metres below the water surface, proof that these chambers were once dry. The tourist route covers about 2,800 metres by boat, taking around 25 minutes, followed by a walk of about 300 metres on foot.

    Did you know? Surveyors have mapped more than 10,600 metres of the main corridor and its side branches, over 1,800 metres of which lie underwater.

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28. 28 Ochtinská Aragonite Cave

    Ochtinská aragonitová jaskyňa

    Slovakia48.665° N 20.309° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    No natural entrance ever existed. The cave was found by chance in 1954, when Martin Cangár and Jiří Prošek, workers of a mineral prospecting company, broke into it while driving an exploratory gallery. It lies in a lens of ancient Devonian limestone and ankerite surrounded by non-karst phyllite rock, and its narrow, upward-tapering passages and chambers were dissolved by slowly moving water mixing along tectonic fractures. A man-made tunnel about 145 metres long, dug from 1966, now leads visitors in to the cave level at 642 metres above sea level.

    Did you know? Iron-rich ochre sediments in the cave hold roughly half their weight in water, absorbing and releasing moisture that helps keep the microclimate stable.

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29. 29 Caves of Han-sur-Lesse

    Grotten van Han

    Belgium50.125° N 5.189° E

    

    People knew the caves long before scientists did: finds from the Stone Age and the Bronze Age show that the entrances were used thousands of years ago, and systematic exploration began in 1771. The largest space on the visitor route is the Salle du Dôme, and other chambers bear names such as the Salle d'Armes and the Mystérieuses. A tall stalagmite called the Minaret is one of the classic sights. Inside, the air is cool and humid all year.

    Did you know? Most finds from the underwater digs date to the Late Bronze Age, around 1100–800 BC, including swords, spearheads and an axe that still has its wooden handle.

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30. 30 Grotta Gigante

    Italy · 6.7 km from Trieste45.709° N 13.764° E

    

    The cave is the surviving stretch of an ancient river gallery cut into Upper Cretaceous limestone that is full of fossil rudists, shellfish that died out with the dinosaurs. Water abandoned it at least five million years ago; a huge collapse, dated to roughly half a million years ago, then merged a lower and an upper gallery into the vast space seen today. Since then dripping water has built stalagmites and columns, some of them stacked like piles of plates because the drops fall from up to 80 metres and splash calcite over a wide area. Iron oxides streak the white and grey calcite with red.

    Did you know? Stalagmites here grow on average about one millimetre every 15 to 20 years.

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