Visit Europe

Underground Europe — The hidden continent beneath your feet

There is a whole Europe you can't see from the surface. Beneath the cities, vineyards, and mountains lies a second continent — carved, dug, and hollowed out by people seeking shelter, wealth, faith, or simply somewhere cool and dark for time to do its work. Underground Europe takes you below.

Some went under to hide. Derinkuyu in Cappadocia descends eleven storeys into the rock and once sheltered up to 20,000 people, an entire city invisible from above. Beneath Naples lie 2,400 years of Greek aqueducts, Roman cisterns, and wartime shelters threaded through the tufa.

Some went under to create. At the Cave of Altamira — the "Sistine Chapel of prehistoric art" — bison were painted 14,000 years ago using the natural contours of the ceiling to give them life.

But mostly, people went under for what the earth held. The Wieliczka Salt Mine hides an entire cathedral carved from salt, chandeliers and all. The Rammelsberg mines and the town of Goslar grew rich on a thousand years of ore; Banská Štiavnica was once the silver heart of the Habsburg Empire; the Great Copper Mountain at Falun gave Sweden its famous red paint; and the Bauhaus-era Zollverein in Essen was once the largest coal mine on earth. Further west, the Major Mining Sites of Wallonia and the Nord-Pas de Calais Mining Basin tell the long, hard story of the people who powered the Industrial Revolution from below.

And some underground spaces exist purely for pleasure: the chalk Champagne Cellars of Reims, where 200 million bottles age in 250 km of tunnels, and the basalt cellars of the Tokaj wine region in Hungary, draped in a black fungus that feeds on the wine vapours.

Twelve sites, all inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. Start your own List → Open de Bucket List