Cango Caves
Interesting facts
- According to legend, guide Johnny van Wassenaer calculated that his 29-hour underground walk in 1898 had taken him 275 metres below the surface.
- Across its 775-metre length, the main Cango I passage never rises or falls by more than about 16 metres.
- The caves come closest to the surface at the top of a shaft in the chamber called the Devil's Kitchen, 52.6 metres above its floor.
- At the far end of Cango II, a 20-metre shaft drops into a flooded chamber whose water flows back toward Cango I.
- The 1975 breakthrough into Cango III took place during a symposium on cave biology, when explorers pumped most of the water out of a flooded chamber.
- Cavers kept extending Cango III, adding 290 metres through a newly found crawlway in December 1977 and another 90 metres in June 1978.
- A 1999 Cango Caves Ordinance gives the provincial government legal powers over the caves, while the Oudtshoorn municipality runs them day to day.
- The Cinema Museum in London holds film footage of a visit to the caves shot in the 1930s.
Why it is worth it
The Cango Caves open into the foothills of the Swartberg range in South Africa's Little Karoo, a sequence of underground halls hung with stalactites, columns and flowstone formed in ancient Precambrian limestone. The system runs for more than 4 km, of which about a quarter is accessible to visitors, and it has long been one of the best known show caves in the country.
People used the caves long before they were mapped: paintings and stone artefacts show that the entrance was occupied during the Middle and Later Stone Ages, though much of the rock art near the entrance has since been damaged. In modern times the cave was explored in 1780 by a local farmer, Jacobus van Zyl, who was lowered into the first great chamber. That hall, roughly as long as a football field, still carries his name. A second chamber was found in 1792, the naturalist Andrew Smith came in 1829, and in 1930 the archaeologist A. J. H. Goodwin of the University of Cape Town dug a test trench that turned up stone tools.
The caves are divided into sections named in order of discovery. A survey in 1897 charted the first 26 chambers, now called Cango I; in 1956 the South African Spelaeological Association produced an accurate map showing a passage about 775 metres long that barely rises or falls. In 1972 three explorers widened a blocked crawl to find Cango II, a further 270 metres beyond the chamber known as the Devil's Kitchen. In 1975 a team drained a flooded chamber at its end and crawled through what had been an underwater passage into Cango III, about a kilometre long, whose largest hall stretches for some 300 metres. A local story holds that the first official guide, Johnny van Wassenaer, walked for 29 hours in 1898 along an underground river and reached a point 25 km from the entrance.
Getting there
The caves lie about 23 km from the town of Oudtshoorn in the Western Cape. The nearest airport is George Airport (GRJ), about 70 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Cango Caves are located in Precambrian limestones at the foothills of the Swartberg range near the town of Oudtshoorn, in the Western Cape Province of South Africa. The principal cave is one of the country's finest, best known, and most popular tourist caves and attracts many visitors from overseas. Although the extensive system of tunnels and chambers go on for over 4 km, only about a quarter of this is open to visitors, who may proceed into the cave only in groups supervised by a guide.
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