Underground Sham


In colloquial terms, ‘sham’ refers to an imitation or counterfeit purporting to be genuine.

This has been happening more and more often lately: a place of interest is advertised somewhere, but does not to exist at all. At the very least, it isn’t accessible, so it does exist in some form. If only they would at least mention that the place is open once a year on Open Monuments Day. Or by appointment, naturally with contact details. Anything else is completely useless; if I know I can get a guided tour by emailing someone but don’t know the email address, I’m at a dead end.


Naturally, one wonders why anyone would go to the trouble of publishing something like this? We’ve come up with three answers to that:

  1. The attraction is on the list because it is actually accessible. At some point, however, it becomes inaccessible for some reason, the contact details are removed, and the entry remains as a ‘dead link’. Incidentally, this is something we also do on showcaves.com, but we explicitly state that it is closed and, if known, why.
  2. It is an institution that prides itself on doing many things – a local authority, a geopark with geosites, or a museum. As proof, they list everything they are responsible for, without taking into account whether the sites are actually accessible for the public. This has an aspect of showing off.
  3. It’s an AI hallucination. Unfortunately, this is currently spreading like wildfire.