Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
the dark, locate prey and communicate. It breathes through frilly, bright-red gills. The skin entirely lacks pigment-
ation but looks pink in the light due to blood circulation.
Cool pitch-black caves slow down life cycles - the gills are a strange evolutionary throwback to the animals'
tadpole stage, which it never fully outgrows, instead reaching sexual maturity at 14 years. No wonder it's always
been a creature of local fascination.
Sights & Activities
CAVE
Postojna Cave
(Postojnska Jama; 700 01 00;
www.postojnska-jama.eu
;
Jamska cesta 30; adult/child/
student €22.90/13.70/18.30; tours hourly 9am-6pm summer, 3 or 4 times from 10am
daily winter)
The Postojna Cave system, a series of caverns, halls and passages some
20.6km long and two million years old, was hollowed out by the Pivka River, which
enters a subterranean tunnel near the cave's entrance. The river continues its deep passage
underground, carving out several series of caves, and emerges again as the Unica River.
Visitors get to see about 5.7km of the cave on 1½-hour tours; some 4km of this is
covered by an electric train, which takes you to the
Big Mountain
(Velika Gora) cavern,
on a trip that's like entering the secret lair of a James Bond villain. From here a guide es-
corts you through halls, galleries and caverns in one of four languages (audio guides are
available in a further dozen languages).
These are dry galleries, decorated with a vast array of white stalactites shaped like
needles, enormous icicles and even fragile spaghetti. The stalagmites take familiar shapes
- pears, cauliflower and sand castles - but there are also bizarre columns, pillars and
translucent curtains that look like rashers of bacon.
From the Velika Gora cavern you continue across the
Russian Bridge
, built by prison-
ers of war in 1916, through the 500m-long
Beautiful Caves
(Lepe Jame) that are filled
with wonderful ribbon-shaped stalactites and stalagmites two million years old (it takes 30
years to produce 1mm of stalactite). The halls of the Beautiful Caves are the furthest point
you'll reach; from here a tunnel stretches to the Black Cave (Črna Jama) and Pivka Cave.
The tour continues south through the Winter Hall (Zimska Dvorana), past the Diamond
Stalagmite and the Pillar Column, which have become symbols of the cave. You then
enter the
Conference Hall
(Kongresna Dvorana), which is the largest in the cave system
and can accommodate 10,000 people for musical performances. In the week between
Christmas and New Year, the Live Christmas Crib (Jaslice) - the Nativity performed by
