Na Turoldu Cave - visit
On their way to the cave, the visitors go through a former quarry in the Turold nature reserve – from the administration building through a 350 m long nature trail circuit with a geological park.
Behind the steel bars and armoured door of the cave portal there is the Old Hall – the first of the spaces of the cave system to be discovered. The hall is dominated by a huge stone called "Guard". On the walls and ceiling there are only fragments of previous stalactite decoration.
The cave tour then continues through a 15 m long corridor called "Descending Corridor" with lustrous crystals and needles of calcite on the walls to the Boulder Dome named after huge blocks broken away from the ceilings. When entering the Boulder Dome, on the right you can see a breathtaking view of lower parts of the cave. Remarkable modelling of both the ceiling and side parts of the cave documents significant action of water erosion and corrosion on the origin and development of these spaces. The left part of the dome is lined with an 18.5 m high fissure leading to the Upper Floors of the cave system.
The cave tour continues with a descent via a wooden staircase to the Treasury. Its snowy walls are corroded into extraordinarily rugged spaces and small cavities. They are similar to stone foam with ledges that in some parts verge into pea-like or fruticose outgrowths covered with lustrous crystals of pure calcite. They were named “Turold decoration,” which can be found in no other cave in the Czech Republic. Some visitors feel like they are walking on a coral seabed. The Shark Jaws Hall follows. It is dominated by the stone formation after which it was named. The hole on the right leads to the Labyrinth. It is bordered with fragments of stone organ. The ceiling, which turns into an 8 m long chimney, appeared in the movie “Třetí skoba pro Kocoura” (“The Third Piton for the Tomcat”).
Then we descend the stone stairs to the Bat Dome. The discoverers named it after a colony of sleeping bats and even now about 250 horseshoe bats and other bats winter here. The snowy-white ceilings of the dome are covered with brownish stains caused by iron oxides and with small black dots caused by manganese oxides. The Bat Dome is one of the main crossings of cave corridors. A short connecting corridor leads from here to the End Hall. A small exhibition introduces bones of the mammoth, extinct buffalo, prehistoric horse and bear found in quarried caves in the Turold Hill, together with Mesozoic fossils of bivalves and gastropods from the Pálava Hills.
The staircase then continues from the Bat Dome to the Fairytale Hall. It is decorated by partly weathered dolomitized sections of limestones with their bizarre shapes resembling various figures. Small visitors especially will enjoy seeing the Madonna, a body-builder, a dog, a hockey goalkeeper, a ruin of a castle, etc. The bottom of these spaces is filled with white limestone sand, which is unusual in caves. The last stop where you can descend from the Bat Dome through a 7 m deep shaft is the Lake Dome. Visitors of the cave tour stand 37 m below the entrance level here. The dome is periodically flooded when the level of the underground water swells, which forms several impressive emerald green lakes here.
