Cuevas del Hams

And today, we did something completely different. We drove to the east side of the island to a cute little port town called Santo Cristo to visit a cave.

The drive was easy. We left the mountains and drove for an hour and a half through flat farmland with windmills to get to the other coast.

The Hams Caves are renowned throughout the world for their peculiar fishhook-shaped formations. (Hams means fishhooks in Mallorquine). Discovered by Pedro Caldentey in 1905, they were the first caves in Spain to be opened to the public. In 1910, these caves already had electricity that was very advanced for its time.

We started out by going down into the Round Cave, an immense botanical garden with local fauna. The roof of the cave had collapsed year ago so the cave was open to the sky.

In the Blue Cave, we watched a documentary called Discovering the Past. It introduced us to the history of Majorca, its first inhabitants, the formation of the Caves and their extraordinary discovery. A very good introduction.

Then we walked up and down stairs to see various formations like “Samson’s Pillars”, the “Plains of Fra Mauro”, and the “Pit of Hell”, where we saw a time lapsed audiovisual called GENESIS -the History of Life. It started out with the Big Bang and went through time right to the present day and was projected onto the rock-face of the cave. Very cool watching a film in a cave!

The Classic Cave, which is made up of 12 galleries, led us through thousands and thousands of tiny (12”) stalagmites and stalactites. We have never seen a cave with so many of these little formations that had taken 10,000 years to form. Sadly, people had broken off bits of them to take home as souvenirs. In one spot, a fence was put in front of us to stop this behaviour.

Thee last cave we visited was at sea level and there was an underground Lake, the Sea of Venice. A short musical show was presented featuring Mozart’s music and visuals on the cave walls.

The Hams Caves are one of Majorca’s main tourist attractions and we definitely enjoyed our hour underground. It is off season now and we enjoyed being with only 2 other couples and the guide. We could ask her lots of questions and she had time to tell us some fun facts about the cave. She said that in the summer, the tour would run every 15 minutes with 30 people in a group. In low season, it runs once and hour.

From the caves we went to have a leisurely mussel, shrimp and salad lunch with sangria,in Porto Cristo.

A super visit to another lovely place.Read more