Devetashka cave
Деветашка пещера
Interesting facts
- Late Pleistocene layers in the cave yielded bones of 136 bird species, over a third of Bulgaria's modern birdlife, making it the country's richest fossil bird site.
- 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.
- Before it held oil, the cave served as a store for the state's food reserves and later became a classified military site, reached by its own road and railway.
- The film crew of The Expendables 2 built a real bridge over the Osam River for the shoot and left it to local residents afterwards.
- Fifteen bat species have been recorded in the cave, four of them on the IUCN Red List, including Schreibers' bat and Mehely's horseshoe bat.
- A bronze appliqué from the 5th century BC found in the cave is held by Bulgaria's National Museum of History.
- The cave was rediscovered in 1921, but systematic archaeological excavations began only in the 1950s.
- Devetashka Cave was declared a protected natural landmark in 1996.
- The area around the cave supports twelve protected species of amphibians and reptiles, among them Hermann's tortoise and the Aesculapian snake.
Why it is worth it
Devetashka Cave is one of the largest caves in Bulgaria, and its entrance hall is among the most striking cave spaces in the Balkans. It opens on the east bank of the Osam River near the village of Devetaki, northeast of Lovech, with a mouth about 35 metres wide and 30 metres high. Some 40 metres in, the passage widens into a single hall of about 2,400 square metres, with a ceiling 60 metres high and in places up to 100 metres. Large holes in the roof let shafts of daylight fall onto the floor, so the main chamber feels half cave, half open valley.
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.
Today its most important residents are bats. The cave is one of the three most important bat hibernation sites in Europe, with a winter colony of tens of thousands of animals of several species, and the surrounding protected area shelters rare amphibians, reptiles and birds. To protect the breeding season the cave is completely closed to visitors in June and July. In 2011 it served as a location for the Hollywood film The Expendables 2; the production was fined for breaches of environmental rules, and the disturbance displaced many bats, though most had returned by late 2012.
Getting there
The cave is about 2 km from Devetaki village, reached by a riverside path, or from Road 301 by a 400-metre dirt track and a concrete bridge. The nearest town is Lovech, about 18 km away; the nearest airport is Plovdiv (PDV), about 130 km away as the crow flies.
Plan your visit
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Nearby places
- Krushuna Falls 12.0 km · waterfall
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From the encyclopaedia
Devetàshka Cave is a large karst cave around 15 km (9.3 mi) southwest of Letnitsa and 15 km (9.3 mi) northeast of Lovech, near the village of Devetaki on the east bank of the river Osam, in Bulgaria. The site was continuously occupied by paleo-humans for tens of thousands of years, served as a shelter for a variety of animal species during extensive periods and is now home to nearly 30,000 bats.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0
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