Avshalom Cave

Avshalom Cave, known to scientists as Soreq Cave and to most Israelis simply as the Stalactite Cave, is a single chamber in the Judean hills packed almost wall to wall with dripstone: curtains, straws, stalactites up to four metres long, and pillars where hanging and rising formations have finally met. It is not among the world's largest caves, covering roughly 5,000 square metres and rising to about 15 metres at its highest, but few caves of its size hold such a dense and varied concentration of formations.

The cave lies on the western slope of Mount Ye'ela, near the Sorek valley that gives it its scientific name, about 385 metres above sea level. The limestone here began to be dissolved and redeposited millions of years ago, and some of the formations in the chamber have been dated to more than 300,000 years. Because temperature and humidity inside stay constant through the year, the layered growth of the speleothems has preserved an unusually detailed record of past rainfall and climate. Research on the cave has reconstructed the climate of the region over roughly the last 185,000 years, and the American geologist James Aronson called it the Rosetta Stone of climate history in the Eastern Mediterranean.

The chamber had no natural entrance known to people. It was found by chance in 1968, when blasting at a gravel quarry near Har-Tuv opened a hole about 60 centimetres across in the rock. One of the quarry workers, Alex Shenberg, crawled through and found himself in a great hall of stalactites; he later described the sensation as standing in a place untouched since the beginning of the world. News spread quickly and crowds began to arrive, so the cave was sealed and guarded while a route was prepared, and for some years its exact location was kept quiet to protect it. It was declared a nature reserve in 1975 and opened to the public in 1977. In the same year it was named after Avshalom Shoham, a young soldier who was mortally wounded in 1970 during the War of Attrition and died in 1974; his family supported the work to prepare the cave for visitors. A path of stone steps leads down from the hillside to the entrance, and inside a walkway loops among the formations, including a stalactite and stalagmite that almost touch.

Getting there

The cave lies in the Avshalom Nature Reserve near Har-Tuv, about 3–4 km east of Bet Shemesh, the nearest city. The nearest airport is Ben Gurion International Airport (TLV), about 31 km away.