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If you only have time to visit one set
of caves on the east coast, this is the one to see. Now that they are a sanitised tourist attraction, it
is hard to imagine how French geologist Edouard Martel felt when he first stepped into
these caves, dark, mysterious and terrifying, in 1876. In fact they had been known about
for centuries - Jaume I found 2,000 Arabs hiding here with their cattle during the
Christian conquest and they were later used by hermits, pirates and smugglers - but it was
Martel who first studied and chronicled these grottoes, 46m above the sea at Cap Vermell,
at the instigation of Archduke Ludwig Salvator. Another early visitor was Jules Verne; the
caves are said to have inspired his Journey to the Centre of the Earth.
The guided tour comes with special effects and the various chambers are given Dantesque
names - Hell, Purgatory, Paradise. The descent into Hell is swifty followed by a son et
lumiere display. Stalactites point down from the mouldy roof like daggers, somehow defying
gravity. One of the chambers is as large as the nave of Palma Cathedral, and the Queen of
Pillars, a stalagmite 22m tall, could almost be a Gothic column. It is growing upwards at
the rate of 2cm every 100 years, in another 5,000 years or so it will be joined to the
ceiling.
You emerge from the caves to a view of the sea, framed by the cavern entrance. Disabled
visitors and others with limited mobility will find the staircases in here particularly
difficult. All visitors should be sensibly shod, as the floor can be slippery. |