Deep Calls to Deep...Ever since Tolkien's Mines of Moria, and perhaps the haunting, grandiose structures of Gormenghast, the vast underground spaces has intrigued and thrilled readers, movie-goers and urban explorers (see our article Abandoned Tunnels and Vast Underground Spaces)
This time we'll highlight a few subterranean (or built into a mountain) cities and huge bunkers - but we have a feeling that our feeble spotlight of information is not going to sweep away the murky mysteries surrounding these sites. There is a vast expanse of tunnels to explore, and you never know what may greet you at the next turn...
Vault in Pyatigorsk, Caucasus, image credit: Dana
Why people would want to live down below is not a surprise to anyone. After all, when Mr. and Mrs. Neanderthal tut-tutted about the sorry state of the neighborhood, what with all those Homo Sapiens moving in and all, they did it around a nice warm fire – in a cave. What is surprising is that even though early man lived in caves for a very, very long times we’ve pretty much abandoned having granite floors and ceilings, homes hewn – or simply found – inside stern mountains...
In, under, or around the mountain - the city must be built!
One town that bridges below ground and above ground is the charming Spanish city of Setenil De Las Bodegas in Andalucia. While a lot of the elegant town is above ground, many of it is also tucked in a wandering network of caves under its sheltering cliffs. Because Setenil De Las Bodegas has been a living city for centuries it also lacks the dust and decay that sometimes haunts a lot of ancient underground settlements.
Here is an aerial video of Setenil De Las Bodegas, showing its incredible location. Also see more images and info.
(image credit: José Luis Sánchez Mesa)
Check out the balcony on the upper left (in the image below) - it does not have much of a view, does it? -
(image credit: Juan Antonio Patiño Méndez)
Elegant Cappadocia
If you want to talk about an almost mystical kingdom that lived as much under the ground as on it then you have to talk about the Cappadocians. So in tune were these ancient Turks (who were there long before there was a Turkey, actually) with the earth that they carved entire towns and cities into natural outcroppings. What's more, they did it elegantly, in a flowing... well, natural fashion. Sure, time has ruined a lot of their work, but still today you can see hints of their craftsmanship and geological architectural skill in the cities and tunnels that survive.
Goreme Valley, Cappadocia, photos by Derrick Pereira
More images and a travelogue here
What’s also fascinating about underground cities is how they can hide, right under out feet, for centuries. Another Turkish underground city was discovered in 1972 when a local farmer noticed his water supply was going somewhere it shouldn’t – that somewhere turning out to be a massive underground city, called Özkonak, that – at it’s height – could have been home to (wait for it) over 60,000 people. Yes, you may whistle.
(image credit: Tatjana)
"Industrial Honeycombing"
There’s not enough space here to go into every ancient underground city – mainly because, like with Özkonak, some of them have no doubt yet to be found – especially if we decide to be generous and stretch the definition of what a city might be. After all, sometimes underground chambers and tunnels never planned to be cities have become makeshift ones, like with the catacombs of Paris and the Resistance during the Second World War.
Here is one of Cold War "underground cities" - a nuclear bunker in Burlington. Appropriately-named "City of Ember" exploration website has a haunting account of penetrating this secret subterranean city, and BBC has an interesting article about it.
(images copyright: Dan Brown)
"The bunker featured an exact replica of the telephone exchange of it's time. The entire nations phone lines could have run through this system." -
(image copyright: Dan Brown)
Australia's "Down Under" name is definitely justified: lots of caves there, but also man-made underground spaces... The Cave Clan, which logo looks like Coca-Cola (check it out) finds weird catacombs, that may scare an occasional tourist and attract droves of urban explorers... There are lots of creepy tunnels and chambers, some with very appropriate names -
"Abandon All Hope" Tunnel, Tasmania, for example:
(image credit: Azenis)
It gets even fuzzier if you include man-made underground structures and not just cities carved by hand into stone. If you use that definition the world is honeycombed by modern underground cities, especially in congested cities like Tokyo, Singapore, London, and New York.
Speaking about New York, National Geographic site has a neat chart of underground infrastructure (make sure to click through to the to-scale version)
Wieliczka Salt Mine
Putting aside the questions of what is or isn’t a real underground city there’s one that has to be mentioned. Yes, it’s ancient, but it was also a living subterranean community up until very recently.
What’s also odd about it was that it was carved not from stone but from salt. Started sometime in the 13th century (again, you can whistle), the Wieliczka Salt Mine in Poland has been in almost continuous operation until 2007. Stretching over 300 kilometers long, it goes as deep as 327 meters. Okay, that’s impressive, but what’s really staggering is that the mine was home to generations of workers and their families, who transformed their simple mine into a cathedral of brilliant and awe-inspiring art.
(images via)
Seems like these mines also had a rich and turbulent history, as witnessed by these paintings:
(images via)
Purely a labor of love, the miners carved the salt into statues, a chandelier, and even into a chapel. But that’s not all: the mine also features a movie theater, an underground lake, a café … all the amenities of life on the surface but rather deep in the living earth.
Chapel deep underground, photo by Cédric Puisney
Abandoned Limestone Quarries, located in Maastricht, Netherlands, also display "works of art" and signs of habitation. They are being explored by Marco Cauberg and his team:
As with narrow houses we talked about before, as the population rises and living space shrinks, its looking more and more likely that many people will be living as their great, great, great ancestors did: below the ground – though at least this time when we complain about the neighbors it’ll be by the light of something much more sophisticated than a roaring fire.
1. Abandoned Salt Mine, RomaniaWe'll start in Cluj County, Romania. The following epic photographs were taken by Marius R. inside the old closed Turda Salt Mine
(Google Earth coordinates: Lat: 46°33'51.92"N - Long: 23°46'7.22"E)
(Middle-Earth coordinates: Mines of Moria) - click to enlarge images.
The closed mine has long tunnels, and a deep natural cave. The excavations dug a huge artificial cave, in which you could fit three 10-story blocks. Marius says: "you can play football inside of them; and you enter there by bus".
(images credit: Marius R.)
2. Top Secret Soviet Underground Submarine Base
Area 825 (built between 1957 and 1961) -
A huge system of tunnels, filled with water - bringing to mind somewhat apocalyptic (or Half-Life) images; this once was the ultimate secret Soviet nuclear submarine base, maintenance & repair facility. So secret it was, in fact, that the whole town around it was classified and erased from the map.
Ten kilometers east of Sevastopol on the Black Sea Coast, the town of Balaklava was closed to the rest of the USSR, and even family members needed special clearance to visit there. After collapse of the Soviet Union the base stayed operational only until 1993, when all nuclear warheads were removed - and in 1996 the last submarine left the base. Today the place is open to visitors, but the bulk of it is hidden and probably holds more secrets than Russian officials care to reveal. (Photos by Russos, with permission.)
Built 126 meters deep underground, the Project 825 also served as a nuclear shelter for 3000 people; it could hold up to nine nuclear submarines at one time; the length of the underground tunnel - half a kilometer, water 9 meters deep.
The cart shown on this photograph was used for transportation of nuclear bombs to the loading area. Next photo - the "Holy of Holies" - Nuclear Weapons Storage Room. Note the reinforced doors (weight 16 tons each):
Entering the Submarine Channel:
See more pictures of it here.
Submarine Fuel Storage Room: (more pictures of that structure here)
(image credit: Sergei Antsupov)
Apparently Russians can build underground structures and tunnels very well (witness the superb Moscow Metro system). This experience will prove handy when another mega-project takes place: The longest tunnel from Russia to Alaska. According to a preliminary report this tremendous undersea tunnel would contain a high-speed railway, highway and pipelines - all 64 miles of it.
3. Cincinnati's Abandoned Subway
Over in America, there are decaying underground spaces on a huge scale, as well.
This Cincinnati Transit site documents all the structures and stations of this unfinished subway transit system, built from 1920 to 1925. Fully seven miles of tunnels, bridges and stations were abandoned in the end, no track was ever put in, and no passengers ever rode the trains.
Three underground stations still exist, but the above-ground structures were demolished, leaving only a few barely-visible access points into the vast underground territory.
One such entry point:
Map of a hidden subway line (one of many):
A similar tunnel system (but build in the 70s) runs underneath downtown core in the city of Calgary, Canada. The LRT (Light Transit System) line was meant to run underground, but the plans were shelved for the financial reasons. There are a few doors in Calgary leading to this explorer's playground, to tunnels wide enough for rush hour traffic.
4. G-CANS: Tokyo Storm Water System
Here is something truly enormous, worthy of Japanese crazed super-scale imagination - vast caverns and otherworldly columns (looking like some kind of a temple) under Tokyo - an infrastructure "built for preventing overflow of the city's major waterways and rivers during rain and typhoon season".
Brainchild of Japan Institute of Wastewater Engineering Technology (JIWET), this "sci-fi"-like installation consists of "five 32m diameter, 65m deep concrete containment silos, connected by 64 kilometers of tunnels 50 meters deep underground. The system is powered by 14000 horsepower turbines which can pump 200 tons of water a second into a nearby river." See more pictures of this incredible place here and here.
(images copyright: 2005 EDOGAWA RIVER OFFICE)
Further sources: 1, 2, via
No matter how complex and well hidden underground structures are, dedicated urban explorers are proving that they can - and will - penetrate any mysterious catacombs and come out with spectacular reports.
CONTINUE TO PART 2 OF THIS ARTICLE! ->
This time we'll highlight a few subterranean (or built into a mountain) cities and huge bunkers - but we have a feeling that our feeble spotlight of information is not going to sweep away the murky mysteries surrounding these sites. There is a vast expanse of tunnels to explore, and you never know what may greet you at the next turn...
Vault in Pyatigorsk, Caucasus, image credit: Dana
Why people would want to live down below is not a surprise to anyone. After all, when Mr. and Mrs. Neanderthal tut-tutted about the sorry state of the neighborhood, what with all those Homo Sapiens moving in and all, they did it around a nice warm fire – in a cave. What is surprising is that even though early man lived in caves for a very, very long times we’ve pretty much abandoned having granite floors and ceilings, homes hewn – or simply found – inside stern mountains...
In, under, or around the mountain - the city must be built!
One town that bridges below ground and above ground is the charming Spanish city of Setenil De Las Bodegas in Andalucia. While a lot of the elegant town is above ground, many of it is also tucked in a wandering network of caves under its sheltering cliffs. Because Setenil De Las Bodegas has been a living city for centuries it also lacks the dust and decay that sometimes haunts a lot of ancient underground settlements.
Here is an aerial video of Setenil De Las Bodegas, showing its incredible location. Also see more images and info.
(image credit: José Luis Sánchez Mesa)
Check out the balcony on the upper left (in the image below) - it does not have much of a view, does it? -
(image credit: Juan Antonio Patiño Méndez)
Elegant Cappadocia
If you want to talk about an almost mystical kingdom that lived as much under the ground as on it then you have to talk about the Cappadocians. So in tune were these ancient Turks (who were there long before there was a Turkey, actually) with the earth that they carved entire towns and cities into natural outcroppings. What's more, they did it elegantly, in a flowing... well, natural fashion. Sure, time has ruined a lot of their work, but still today you can see hints of their craftsmanship and geological architectural skill in the cities and tunnels that survive.
Goreme Valley, Cappadocia, photos by Derrick Pereira
More images and a travelogue here
What’s also fascinating about underground cities is how they can hide, right under out feet, for centuries. Another Turkish underground city was discovered in 1972 when a local farmer noticed his water supply was going somewhere it shouldn’t – that somewhere turning out to be a massive underground city, called Özkonak, that – at it’s height – could have been home to (wait for it) over 60,000 people. Yes, you may whistle.
(image credit: Tatjana)
"Industrial Honeycombing"
There’s not enough space here to go into every ancient underground city – mainly because, like with Özkonak, some of them have no doubt yet to be found – especially if we decide to be generous and stretch the definition of what a city might be. After all, sometimes underground chambers and tunnels never planned to be cities have become makeshift ones, like with the catacombs of Paris and the Resistance during the Second World War.
Here is one of Cold War "underground cities" - a nuclear bunker in Burlington. Appropriately-named "City of Ember" exploration website has a haunting account of penetrating this secret subterranean city, and BBC has an interesting article about it.
(images copyright: Dan Brown)
"The bunker featured an exact replica of the telephone exchange of it's time. The entire nations phone lines could have run through this system." -
(image copyright: Dan Brown)
Australia's "Down Under" name is definitely justified: lots of caves there, but also man-made underground spaces... The Cave Clan, which logo looks like Coca-Cola (check it out) finds weird catacombs, that may scare an occasional tourist and attract droves of urban explorers... There are lots of creepy tunnels and chambers, some with very appropriate names -
"Abandon All Hope" Tunnel, Tasmania, for example:
(image credit: Azenis)
It gets even fuzzier if you include man-made underground structures and not just cities carved by hand into stone. If you use that definition the world is honeycombed by modern underground cities, especially in congested cities like Tokyo, Singapore, London, and New York.
Speaking about New York, National Geographic site has a neat chart of underground infrastructure (make sure to click through to the to-scale version)
Wieliczka Salt Mine
Putting aside the questions of what is or isn’t a real underground city there’s one that has to be mentioned. Yes, it’s ancient, but it was also a living subterranean community up until very recently.
What’s also odd about it was that it was carved not from stone but from salt. Started sometime in the 13th century (again, you can whistle), the Wieliczka Salt Mine in Poland has been in almost continuous operation until 2007. Stretching over 300 kilometers long, it goes as deep as 327 meters. Okay, that’s impressive, but what’s really staggering is that the mine was home to generations of workers and their families, who transformed their simple mine into a cathedral of brilliant and awe-inspiring art.
(images via)
Seems like these mines also had a rich and turbulent history, as witnessed by these paintings:
(images via)
Purely a labor of love, the miners carved the salt into statues, a chandelier, and even into a chapel. But that’s not all: the mine also features a movie theater, an underground lake, a café … all the amenities of life on the surface but rather deep in the living earth.
Chapel deep underground, photo by Cédric Puisney
Abandoned Limestone Quarries, located in Maastricht, Netherlands, also display "works of art" and signs of habitation. They are being explored by Marco Cauberg and his team:
As with narrow houses we talked about before, as the population rises and living space shrinks, its looking more and more likely that many people will be living as their great, great, great ancestors did: below the ground – though at least this time when we complain about the neighbors it’ll be by the light of something much more sophisticated than a roaring fire.
1. Abandoned Salt Mine, RomaniaWe'll start in Cluj County, Romania. The following epic photographs were taken by Marius R. inside the old closed Turda Salt Mine
(Google Earth coordinates: Lat: 46°33'51.92"N - Long: 23°46'7.22"E)
(Middle-Earth coordinates: Mines of Moria) - click to enlarge images.
The closed mine has long tunnels, and a deep natural cave. The excavations dug a huge artificial cave, in which you could fit three 10-story blocks. Marius says: "you can play football inside of them; and you enter there by bus".
(images credit: Marius R.)
2. Top Secret Soviet Underground Submarine Base
Area 825 (built between 1957 and 1961) -
A huge system of tunnels, filled with water - bringing to mind somewhat apocalyptic (or Half-Life) images; this once was the ultimate secret Soviet nuclear submarine base, maintenance & repair facility. So secret it was, in fact, that the whole town around it was classified and erased from the map.
Ten kilometers east of Sevastopol on the Black Sea Coast, the town of Balaklava was closed to the rest of the USSR, and even family members needed special clearance to visit there. After collapse of the Soviet Union the base stayed operational only until 1993, when all nuclear warheads were removed - and in 1996 the last submarine left the base. Today the place is open to visitors, but the bulk of it is hidden and probably holds more secrets than Russian officials care to reveal. (Photos by Russos, with permission.)
Built 126 meters deep underground, the Project 825 also served as a nuclear shelter for 3000 people; it could hold up to nine nuclear submarines at one time; the length of the underground tunnel - half a kilometer, water 9 meters deep.
The cart shown on this photograph was used for transportation of nuclear bombs to the loading area. Next photo - the "Holy of Holies" - Nuclear Weapons Storage Room. Note the reinforced doors (weight 16 tons each):
Entering the Submarine Channel:
See more pictures of it here.
Submarine Fuel Storage Room: (more pictures of that structure here)
(image credit: Sergei Antsupov)
Apparently Russians can build underground structures and tunnels very well (witness the superb Moscow Metro system). This experience will prove handy when another mega-project takes place: The longest tunnel from Russia to Alaska. According to a preliminary report this tremendous undersea tunnel would contain a high-speed railway, highway and pipelines - all 64 miles of it.
3. Cincinnati's Abandoned Subway
Over in America, there are decaying underground spaces on a huge scale, as well.
This Cincinnati Transit site documents all the structures and stations of this unfinished subway transit system, built from 1920 to 1925. Fully seven miles of tunnels, bridges and stations were abandoned in the end, no track was ever put in, and no passengers ever rode the trains.
Three underground stations still exist, but the above-ground structures were demolished, leaving only a few barely-visible access points into the vast underground territory.
One such entry point:
Map of a hidden subway line (one of many):
A similar tunnel system (but build in the 70s) runs underneath downtown core in the city of Calgary, Canada. The LRT (Light Transit System) line was meant to run underground, but the plans were shelved for the financial reasons. There are a few doors in Calgary leading to this explorer's playground, to tunnels wide enough for rush hour traffic.
4. G-CANS: Tokyo Storm Water System
Here is something truly enormous, worthy of Japanese crazed super-scale imagination - vast caverns and otherworldly columns (looking like some kind of a temple) under Tokyo - an infrastructure "built for preventing overflow of the city's major waterways and rivers during rain and typhoon season".
Brainchild of Japan Institute of Wastewater Engineering Technology (JIWET), this "sci-fi"-like installation consists of "five 32m diameter, 65m deep concrete containment silos, connected by 64 kilometers of tunnels 50 meters deep underground. The system is powered by 14000 horsepower turbines which can pump 200 tons of water a second into a nearby river." See more pictures of this incredible place here and here.
(images copyright: 2005 EDOGAWA RIVER OFFICE)
Further sources: 1, 2, via
No matter how complex and well hidden underground structures are, dedicated urban explorers are proving that they can - and will - penetrate any mysterious catacombs and come out with spectacular reports.
CONTINUE TO PART 2 OF THIS ARTICLE! ->
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