Orda Cave
Interesting facts
- Of roughly 4.6 kilometres of surveyed passages, only about 300 metres are dry; everything beyond the entrance grottoes lies underwater.
- It is often described as the largest underwater gypsum cave in the world, and it ranks about 21st by length among the world's gypsum caves.
- In 2011 a team led by photographer Viktor Lyagushkin made around 150 dives in six months and reportedly produced the first spherical panorama of an underwater cave.
- For a 2012 art project, a two-time world freediving champion posed for photographs at 17 metres depth in water of about 5 °C.
- In December 2012 a freediver swam 100 metres through the flooded galleries on a single breath in about two minutes.
- In 2017 the Japanese broadcaster NHK filmed a documentary here, bringing more than 1.5 tonnes of equipment and spending over 50 hours underwater in total darkness.
- The NHK crew dived while the air temperature on the surface had dropped to around minus 40 °C.
- The American cave diver and filmmaker Jill Heinerth explored the cave in 2007, the year after Martyn Farr's expedition.
- Small crustaceans live in the cold, clear water of the flooded galleries.
Why it is worth it
From the surface, Orda Cave is almost nothing: a doorway five metres wide and two high in a sinkhole on the south slope of Kazakovskaya Hill, on the edge of the village of Orda in Perm Krai. Behind it, a short dry section leads down to two icy lakes, and beneath them opens one of the great underwater caves of the world — kilometres of flooded galleries dissolved in gypsum and anhydrite laid down in the Permian period. It is the longest water-filled cave in Russia, and one of its passages is the longest sump in the former Soviet Union, 935 metres.
The dry part, only about 300 metres long, is itself striking: the Crystal Grotto, the Ice Lake, and the chamber called the Ice Palace, where the Main and Warm lakes are the entrances to the flooded world. Beyond them, the main galleries are named after the cities of the cavers who first explored them — Chelyabinsk, Krasnoyarsk, Moscow and Sverdlovsk passages. The water is extraordinarily clear, around 4 °C, and divers report visibility of more than forty metres.
The cave was first entered in January 1993 by a caver from Perm, and systematic exploration and underwater surveying followed. From 2002 a Perm diving centre developed the site, building Russia's first cave-diving base about fifty metres from the entrance. The British cave diver Martyn Farr came in 2006 and compared its galleries with those of the great limestone sumps of Australia; the photographer Viktor Lyagushkin's book on the cave won Russia's national underwater-photography award. The cave is a protected natural monument of Perm Krai, and the local museum in Orda has an exhibition about it. Its beauty is reserved for trained cave divers; other visitors can see the entrance grottoes.
Getting there
The cave lies on the south-western edge of the village of Orda, on the left bank of the Kungur River, about 26 km from the town of Kungur. The nearest airport is Perm (PEE), about 97 km away. Diving is organised through the dive base at the cave entrance.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Orda Cave is a gypsum cave found underneath the western Ural Mountains. The mouth is near the shore of the Kungur River just outside Orda, Perm Krai in Russia. The cave system stretches over 5.1 kilometres (3.2 mi) with around 4.8 kilometres (3.0 mi) over the overall length being underwater. This makes it one of the longest underwater caves and the largest underwater gypsum cave in the world. It contains the longest siphon in the former Soviet Union.
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