THE CAVES OF CASTELLANA

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The Caves of Castellana in Puglia, discovered by Franco Anelli in 1938, are the best-known speleological complex in Italy and constitute one of the main tourist itineraries in Puglia. The caves include five cavities (Grotta Nera, Salone delle Statue, Sala della Civetta, Sala dell'Altare, Grotta Bianca) and are connected by tunnels and corridors, both natural and artificial, along a route approximately three kilometers long, and reach a maximum depth 122 meters from the surface. The temperature of the internal rooms is about 16.5°C.
It is one of the most suggestive aspects of the Apulian karst phenomena. The first cave of the karst system of the Grotte di Castellana and the only one communicating with the outside is the Grave: a grandiose natural pantheon one hundred meters long, fifty wide and sixty deep.
From the tomb begins the visit itinerary in the Castellana Caves which present, in all their extension, both in the tourist itinerary and in the secondary branches, a multiplicity of dimensions, shapes and styles. The great caverns are followed by great galleries, these by narrow and high ravines which open into new caverns and other galleries. This succession is often interrupted by abrupt reductions in the section of narrow meanders and small bottlenecks.
Finally, the numerous and deep chasms encountered along the way indicate the ways through which the stream that dug the caves undertook the search for its ultimate goal, reaching sea level. The richness of the forms, typical of the Baroque, combined with the ascending tension of the Gothic, often flank each other in a single cavern or chase each other in scenarios that the most imaginative artist would have struggled to imagine and make coexist in a single harmony.
At the end of the underground path and about fifteen hundred meters from the Grave, a small portal dug into an imposing alabaster wall leads into the last and most beautiful cave of the Castellana Caves: the White Cave, defined for its candor as the "most splendid of the world"; elegant and majestic, which fascinates with the richness and whiteness of the alabaster. A truly unmissable show.
The Castellana Caves are inhabited by various animal species. First of all we recall Italodytes stammeri, a blind beetle, of the group of carabids, about half a centimeter long, with brownish elytra, pale ovals, with thin and very elongated legs. Another animal present in the caves is a cave-dwelling orthoptera, Troglophilus Andreinii, a species of grasshopper with long thread-like antennae, which can be observed completely immobile on the walls or in slow movement, ready to leap quickly as soon as it is touched. Again in the kingdom of insects we recall some very singular parasitic diptera on bats: Nycteribosca africana and Nycteribosca Kollari. Among the mammals present there are chiropterans or bats, the species recognized or captured alive in recent years are: Miniopterus schreibersii, Myotis capaccinii, Myotis blithyii, Rhinolophus euryale, Rhinolophus ferrumequinum
On the other hand, one cannot speak of real flora in the caves. The plants are represented by species that love dark natural environments (homophilous or sciaphilous plants) and by plants that prefer air and substrate humidity (hygrophilous plants) and are represented by ferns, mosses, rare lichens, some saprophytic fungi but mostly from algae and some bacteria.

How to get there:
By car: 45 km from Bari
By bus: 1.20 h (Ferrovie Sud Est)