Anna cave EarthCache

The Anna Cave is a natural limestone cave in Miskolc-Lillafüred, Hungary, near the greatest waterfall in Hungary. The cave stands out even on a European level. The limestone that has been carried by the Szinva Stream over several tens of thousands of years has shaped special limestone tuff formations and fossilised plants into what we can see today.

The cave was discovered in the XIX. century, when opening a shaft in the limestone in order to provide the iron furnace at Hámor with water. It soon became a tourist attraction, however, in the second part of the century, when the iron furnaces were closed, the cave was forgotten.

The entrance of the cave, opened for mass tourism in 1927, can be found in Lillafüred in the lower-most supporting wall of the terraced garden of the Palota Hotel right beside the waterfall. The network system, altogether 800 m long, was created artificially by connecting and widening 34 larger caverns which were formed when the fresh-water limestone was deposited by the Szinva.

The cavities were not dissolved and eroded into the receptive rocks by water after their creation, but rather they evolved simultaneously with the rock mass. Fossilized curtains of lime-covered algae- and moss-threads with fine fringe trimmings hang from the ceiling of the subterranean nooks and crannies. In places, hundreds of thousands of tiny spring limestone nodules sit beside each other, at others fossilized tree leaves, blades of grass, twigs or their fossil prints preserve the relics of the past millennias' flora. The majority of smaller cavities evolved in the place of vast decayed tree trunks that were once buried in the rocks.

The Waterfall