Aven d'Orgnac

Interesting facts

The ashes of Robert de Joly, the caver who led the first descent in 1935, rest in the great hall that bears his name.

Joly's caving club, founded in 1929, listed among its aims the search for chasms suitable for tourism, and he was hunting for 'a new Aven Armand'.

On returning to the surface after the first descent, Joly had three municipal councillors sign a statement certifying that his team were the first to go down.

The Joly hall lies on average about 55 metres below ground, and its ceiling rises roughly 30 metres above the floor.

Because the ceilings are so high, many stalagmites never met stalactites to form columns and instead grew massively thick at their bases.

A huge block that fell from the roof of the Joly hall onto the rubble cone beneath the entrance shaft is nicknamed 'the Titanic'.

Joly found bones of reindeer and bison, animals of a much colder climate, in the clay of the upper hall.

Researchers link the deep karst here to the Messinian salinity crisis, when the Mediterranean largely dried up and local rivers cut down by hundreds of metres.

The discovery of new networks in 1965–66 led to a long dispute with neighbouring Issirac, which owned the land above them, settled only by an agreement in 1978.

A tunnel over 100 metres long was dug in 1938 to bring visitors in, a lift followed in 1965, and annual visitors passed 100,000 in 1966.

Why it is worth it

Aven d'Orgnac is a cave of chambers on a cathedral scale. From the limestone plateau of the Bois de Ronze, south of the Gorges de l'Ardèche, a natural shaft opens into a sequence of vast halls filled with stalagmites, some slender, some massive and broken, some topped with fresh growth. The largest hall, named after the cave's discoverer, measures about 122 by 74 metres and alone accounts for more than two-fifths of the volume of the tourist section.

Local people knew the opening as the Bertras sinkhole long before anyone went down it. On 19 August 1935 the speleologist Robert de Joly led a team of five cavers into the shaft and found the great chambers below. Development followed quickly: the cave was inaugurated for visitors on 11 July 1939, and it was classified as a natural monument in 1946. Explorations in 1965 and 1966 revealed further networks, known as Orgnac II, III and IV, which multiplied the known extent of the system roughly fivefold, and protection was extended to them in 1974. The cave reaches a known depth of about 187 metres. Among its best-known formations are a leaning stalagmite nicknamed the Tower of Pisa, the Pine Cone, and the Ghost Ship, a huge fallen stalagmite on which new concretions have grown.

The cave formed in Urgonian limestone, a coral-derived rock laid down in the Lower Cretaceous, which rainwater has dissolved over long ages into shafts and halls. The surrounding area is also important for prehistory: the site of Orgnac III, on the plateau, is one of the oldest known places to have yielded stone tools made with the Levallois technique, and the Cité de la Préhistoire beside the cave presents the archaeology of the region. In 2004 Aven d'Orgnac received the Grand Site de France label, a national distinction for outstanding landscapes.

Getting there

The cave lies in the commune of Orgnac-l'Aven in the Ardèche. The nearest sizeable town is Bagnols-sur-Cèze, about 24 km to the southeast. Nîmes-Arles-Camargue Airport (FNI) is about 63 km away.

Aven d'Orgnac

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

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