Maps on showcaves.com


showcaves.com offers information on underground sites open to the public, all over the world. Whats more obvious than to order its content by geographic location. And there is a second reason, geology tends to create areas of similar geologic features, so each area will concentrate its typical sites, while they may be rare around. This is also a geographic quality, and it makes sen, for example, to order caves by karst area, mines by mining area.

Another way to group the sites is by political borders. Again the reason is simple: our visitors wil most likely plan to visit a country or an area and may look for tourist sites nearby. As a result it is important to allow some kind of navigation between nearby sites.

On showcaves.com we tried to locate every site on a map. Once, before web 2.0, it was necessary to draw the maps, but today we can use google tools.

There is a world map linked on the central page of the website, and from here you may click your way to continents and then countries. We have maps for many countries too. All those maps are base on public domain maps by the CIA, but they were redrawn to suit the need of this website. They are clickable so it is possible to zoom in by clicking on a continent to see the country map. The way back is possible by overview buttons in the upper left and right corners of the page. And on the country level it is possible to move to neighbouring countries by clicking on their names. Some of the maps even contain the locations of the subterranea represented by their symbols. They are active too and will lead to the description of the respective site.

We have now started to include Google Maps into our website. So there are some of the most detailed maps now drawn by google, while we add just the locations of the cave. Such pages are generally found on the State level.