Moravian Karst
Five show caves
Cave Administration of Czech Republic
Depertment of Moravian Karst - leader Ing. Jakub Gabriš
Svitavská 11-13,
678 01 Blansko
tel.: +420 516 415 476, +420 516 417 903
GPS: 49°21'25"N, 16°38'41"E
- map
The world-famous karst region lies on the territory of the Czech lands, in Moravia, not far from Brno. It is a fairly hilly landscape dissected by deep valleys of an area of about 100 km2, built up of the limestone of Devonian age. The image of the region has been worked out by the running water since that time, when the region was left by the sea the long bygone geological epochs ago.
The activity of the running water in the underlying limestone can be seen not only on the surface in deep valleys, karst canyons with sinks and resurgences of the sunken watercourses, dolines and abysses, but also deep in the underground, where the subterranean rivers and the collapse processes have been creating the cave system until nowadays. The cavers, who discovered the caves, have passed already tens of kilometres of galleries and domes, but they have not been able in any case to discover all, that is still hidden in the underground of the Moravian Karst. Yet long time ago five caves out of numerous discovered ones were chosen to be made accessible to public.
They are the Sloup-Sosuvka Caves, the Punkva Caves, the Catherine Cave, Vypustek Cave and the Balcarka Cave. The Punkva Caves discovered by Professor Karel Absolon are the most famous of all thanks to their connection with the bottom of the Macocha Abyss and the cruise on the subterranean Punkva River. But in no way does this mean that the other caves would be second-rate. Maybe for somebody they are not so well-known, but in fact their natural and scientific value is immense, indeed. The growth of interest of the visits to them as well as to all the surrounding nice landscape has claimed the legal strict conservation of the entire region of the Moravian Karst. In 1956 the territory was declared the Protected Landscape Region by the law. In this way the caves became an integral part of natural and cultural riches of the State that are to be preserved for the future times.
