Cave Replicas


photography
Grotesquery, Czech Republic. Public Domain.

Cave replicas, i.e. artificial caves modelled on real caves, are often built for didactic or aesthetic reasons. The first group is located in a museum, usually a SubterraneaCave and Karst Museum, and allows young and old to visit a cave, including the disabled of course, as the replica has no need for steps so that the copies can easily be made barrier-free. In addition, such caves can offer a somewhat less extreme caving experience and serve as educational caves. And then there is a second group that is built to create a beautiful place. Here the SubterraneaGrotto, a seemingly underground space that is cave-like, overlaps with the cave replicas. Some caves are so fragile and yet still so important to mankind that it is important to protect them and still make them accessible to the public. However, these are picture caves, the pictures are the sensitive part, and there is a separate page for these SubterraneaPainted Cave Replicas.

The grottoes developed in the 18th and 19th centuries, primarily as garden architecture. Later, they were also integrated into palaces and other buildings. At some point, the wild orgy of decoration gave way to more realistic cave scenes. Then came the idea of presenting such cave copies at world exhibitions or other events. The cases in which speleothems were removed from a cave and placed in a kind of labyrinth to create a kind of artificial cave were a real low point. The real stalactites were supposed to make the copy look more lifelike. Unfortunately, this had two disadvantages: The cave was destroyed, and the result was still not really satisfactory. A famous negative example was the so-called model cave of Keith and Allabaugh, who cleared out parts of Bethlehem Cave, SD, U.S.A.


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