Guiness World (Cave) Records


Guiness from Dublin, Ireland, is a company famous for its dark stout beer, which is sold virtually world wide. There is a proverb that the three main Irish articles of exportation are poor emigrants, missionaries and Guiness beer.

But Guiness is also famous for a second thing, the Guiness Book of World Records. It is a book, redone almost every year, which collects world records. Some of them are rather common, like the biggest plane or the highest building. Others are somewhat strange, like the Largest Annual Food Fight. And some are ugly, like the most straws stuffed in the mouth.

showcaves.com is about caves and mines, not about records. But obviously there are also records in the world of caves, and we have listed the more serious ones on the page ExplainCave Statistics and the less serious ones on the page SmileCave Statistics in the World of Commercial Caves

At first we were not very interested in the opinion of Guinness about caves. But unfortunately we continually got emails from caves, which were very fond to be included into the Guiness Book. Unfortunately we were not able to check if they really were listed, and so we decided to buy a copy of the book to check this. We are very fond to own this book now, as it is ideal to be placed on the loo. You can read a few facts while sitting comfortable.

However, the result of our research is: there are much less records in the book, than what people told us. We could not find most of the records. We guess some might have been in older revisions, others are just not published. And obviously there are differences in the editions from country to country. The website tells, they have 30,000 records in their database but publish only 4,000 in the book and about 3,000 online.