Slovenia In Your Pocket - Postojna Cave (Postojnska Jama)

When you are in Slovenia, you must see Postojna cave It’s the biggest tourist attraction here and the largest cave in Europe. At over 20km long you have to take a rollercoaster train ride to get inside, so follow me! This is a section where the formations are a bit darker, because of carbon soot on them. We are now in the chandelier room. Ohhh, ahhh! Over 500.000 tourists pass through this cave every year and you can see why. We’re in the white room in Postojna cave with Stanislav Glažar, our guide. Can you tell us a little bit about the history of the cave. Postojnska jama (Postojna cave) was discovered in 1818 by Luka Čeč. He was from the village of Postojna. And as he discovered Postojnska jama in April 1818 the cave was opened up to the chandelier room already in 1819. In Postojnska jama there are millions of cave formations. This is somehow the speciality of Postojnska jama, the density of cave formations. It’s an area with a lot of rain and there is a sort of a physical and chemical process caused by the rain water. The rain water will pass through the different strata that are above us. On its way with CO2 the water will dissolve the limestone and the other compounds like iron oxide, bauxite, aluminium, copper oxide. And the water will transport them to the inside of the cave where they will simply crystallize into different shapes. If they stay on the ceiling they will be stalactites. If the water will fall on the floor they will form stalagmites. And it takes approximately 10 years for one millimetre. You can see on the ceiling thousands of tiny stalactites. They are little hollow tubes. The water will pass from the inside and the limestone will crystallize at the end of it. They're just like spaghetti. The cave system was formed in upper cretaceous limestone strata around 3.5 million years ago. The cave system is 20km long and there are two different levels. The lower level is obviously closed to the general public, because you need special cave equipment. Near the entrances we have found a lot of animal bones from cave bears actually 10.000 years old. Then a lot of remains from the Palaeolithic and a lot of signatures, actually 52 different signatures. And the earliest one was from 1213, so the very beginning of the 13th century.