George T. Wittman’s newest blog post!
I recently came across an article about some of the most amazing underground wonders around the world. Unfortunately, I haven’t been to as many of them as I’d like, but they all sound astounding to me.
On the island of Palawa in the Philippines is Puerto Princesa, an underground river that runs five miles underneath a limestone karst mountain and connect the Cabayugan River to the South China Sea. Through underground guided rafting trips, you can see several large underground chambers, some of which are as wide as 390 feet and nearly 200 feet high.
The stone walls inside the Thrihnukagigur Volcano in Iceland are filled with a psychedelic sort of pattern.
Since the Middle Ages, the Turda Salt Mines in Transylvania have been excavated by generations of miners. It’s currently a subterranean museum and recreation center, complete with basketball hoops, a mini-golf course, Ferris wheel and underground lake. The mines even have halotherapy spa facilities, which treat respiratory problems through ionized air, pressure and humidity.
For the past 4,000 years, Thrihnukagigur Volcano in Iceland has been dormant. Over the course of this time, the magma in the volcano somehow drained away, leaving behind amazing mineral coloration. Visitors to the volcano enter the maw via a cable car nearly 400 feet down.
On the eastern border of the Chapada Diamantina range in northeast Brazil, the Poço Encantado (Enchanted Well) is a massive underground lake, with a natural window up above. But just referring to it as an “underground lake” doesn’t do the Poço Encantado justice. The water is so clear that you can see over 200 feet to the bottom of the lake, filled with ancient tree trunks and rock formations.
Back in 2000, La Cueva de los Cristales was discovered in the Naica Mine in Mexico, after water was pumped out of the small chamber. The gypsum columns there are some of the largest natural crystals in the world. Unfortunately, visiting this wonder is rather difficult, due to dangerous conditions: the chamber has near 100% humidity and reaches temperatures as high as 136 degrees, thanks to a pool of magma underneath the cave.
The glowworm caves look like something out of an episode of Star Trek or Star Wars.
After Peter Jackson filmed the epic “Lord of the Rings” trilogy in New Zealand, the oceanic island has since become the place to go for anything fantasy-related. But there was one great feature of the island that Peter Jackson didn’t put into his epic blockbuster trilogy: the Waitomo Glowworm Caves a couple hours south of Auckland. The caves are filled with New Zealand’s indigenous glowworm, the arachnocampa luminosa, which gives off a subtle blue glow that makes the underground caves look like something out of a sci-fi film.
Greenbrier, a swanky resort in south-eastern West Virginia, looks nondescript enough. However, in 1956, the government built a bunker there to house Congress if a nuclear war were to break out. The fallout shelter, since declassified, could house more than 1,100 people behind 25-ton doors. The bunker was equipped with such features and facilities as a power plant, decontamination chambers, communications equipment, meeting rooms and a great hall for joint sessions.
Across the pond, as German fighter planes dropped bombs down onto England’s major cities during World War II, the British built a secret underground bunker in London. Occupied by ministers, military personnel and Winston Churchill himself, the Cabinet War Rooms saw extensive use from the start to the end of World War II. Much of the bunker has since become a museum, preserving many of the various artifacts used in that era, such as large maps full of pinpricks and even the swivel chair that Churchill used.
A screenshot of the morbid Capuchin ossuary.
San Clemente Basilica in Rome is steeped in history; built in the 12th century on top of a fourth-century church, itself built over a first-century home that stands next to a second-century temple dedicated to the all-male fertility cult of the sun god Mithras. A 10-minute walk from the Basilica is the church of Santa Maria della Concezione, underneath which is a grim ossuary where the bones of 4,000 Capuchin monks were used to artistically decorate the space with chandeliers, coats of arms and archways.
For forty years in the first half of the 20th century, the eccentric immigrant Baldassare Forestiere built a subterranean home and garden in Fresno, CA, inspired by the ancient catacombs of his native Sicily. Using nothing but farming tools, Forestiere dug about 10,000 square feet of rooms, a chapel and even an underground fishing pond.
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