Castellana Caves
Grotte di Castellana
Interesting facts
- The Grave, the entrance chasm, is a vertical drop of about 60 metres and roughly 100 metres long by 50 metres wide.
- The explored system runs for about 3 kilometres and reaches some 122 metres below the surface.
- The caves are carved into Upper Cretaceous limestone laid down around 90 million years ago.
- Formations have earned names such as the Owl, the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the Capitoline She-Wolf, and one passage is likened to a tiny Grand Canyon.
- Between 1953 and 1986 eight films were shot inside the caves.
- Hell in the Cave, an aerial show inspired by Dante's Inferno and staged in the Grave, drew about 30,000 spectators between 2011 and 2014.
- A speleological museum opened on 23 January 2000, exactly 62 years after Anelli first looked into the Grave.
- The caves shelter five species of bat and a large population of the cave cricket Troglophilus andreinii.
Why it is worth it
The Castellana Caves exist on record because of a job that had nothing to do with finding them. In January 1938, the Provincial Tourist Board of Bari brought in Franco Anelli, a speleologist from the Italian Institute of Speleology, simply to assess some already-known local caves for their tourism potential. Instead, on January 23, Anelli found himself looking down into the Grave โ a sinkhole that turned out to be the entrance to something far bigger.
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.
So the caves effectively have two discoverers, arriving by two different routes seventeen months apart โ the credentialed speleologist called in to do a routine survey, and the local worker who kept going after the expert had left.
Getting there
4 km from Putignano. Bari Karol Wojtyลa International Airport (BRI) is about 44 km away.
Plan your visit
We have no confirmed visit data yet. Once it is confirmed, this block also carries the date it was checked.
Nearby places
- The Trulli of Alberobello 12.7 km ยท trullo
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Castellana Caves are a karst cave system located in the municipality of Castellana Grotte, in the Metropolitan City of Bari, Apulia, southern Italy.
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