Mountains/a journey we curate for you

Devetashka Cave

An immense limestone hall lit from above

setting

Mountains

where

Devetaki, Lovech Province, Bulgaria

best season

May to October. Access is restricted during…

ideal for

Nature Journey

( the feeling of it )

Daylight falls through holes in a roof sixty metres up, in columns, into a hall people have lived in for seventy thousand years.

( the story )

A vast cave near Lovech where daylight falls through roof openings into a 2,400 m² hall — inhabited by people for 70,000 years, and by 30,000 bats now.

Devetashka opens on the east bank of the river Osam with a mouth thirty-five metres wide and thirty high, and runs two kilometres into the hill. Its main hall covers 2,400 square metres beneath a roof sixty metres up — a hundred in places — and several great openings in that ceiling let daylight fall through in columns, which is the thing people come to stand under. Nearly thirty thousand bats live here across fifteen species. Archaeology shows almost continuous human occupation since the late Palaeolithic, reaching back some seventy thousand years, with a particularly rich Neolithic layer from 6,000 to 4,000 BC. It is about fifteen kilometres from Lovech, and it played a part in The Expendables 2 — a shoot that disturbed the bats badly enough to become a cautionary tale.

Vislupus · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons

You don’t simply book a room in Devetashka Cave. You tell us what you’re seeking — stillness, ceremony, the mountains, the table — and we curate the days around you.

( field notes, dawn to night )

A day here

morning

The light comes through the roof openings at its most solid — you can see the shafts.

midday

Deeper in, where the daylight gives up and fifteen species of bat take over.

afternoon

Out along the Osam, limestone above, the whole valley quiet.

dusk

Standing back from the mouth as the bats come out, which takes a long time.

Experiences we can arrange

Guided Cave Visits

Photography Journeys

Private Transfers

Archaeology Walks

Countryside Stays

( let us curate your retreat )

Standing in a room that has sheltered people for seventy millennia does something to your sense of scale.

Come and stand in the light shafts.

best time to visit — May to October. Access is restricted during the bats' breeding season, so check before travelling in early summer.

have us curate this journey →

tell us what you're seeking · we compose the days around you

( keep wandering )

More high in the mountains

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