Sontheim Cave
| Sontheim Cave
|
||
|---|---|---|
 White calcareous sinter stalagmite |
||
| Location: | Swabian Alb , Germany | |
|
Geographic location: |
48 ° 25 '52.3 " N , 9 ° 41' 1.8" E | |
|
||
| Discovery: | 1488, first mention | |
| Show cave since: | 1825 | |
| Lighting: | electric | |
| Overall length: | 530 meters | |
| Length of the show cave area: |
192 meters | |
| Average annual number of visitors: | 3,600 (2007-2011) | |
| Current visitors: | 4,733 (2011) | |
The Sontheimer Höhle , which was formerly called the Sontheimer Erdloch , is a stalactite cave with a length of 530 meters. It is located in Baden-Württemberg in the White Jura Delta at 730 m above sea level. NN near Heroldstatt , part of the municipality Sontheim, on the Swabian Alb .
history
The cave was described for the first time in 1488 by the Dominican prior Felix Fabri from Ulm . Until around 1790, farmers from Sontheim held a cave festival every year on Whit Monday. Around 1825 the cave festival was held again, until today, always on Whitsunday. The cave has been used as a show cave since 1825 , with a guide path of 192 meters in length. Initially, the cave was illuminated with pitch torches, which colored the various stalactite and sinter formations black. Today white layers are growing back again.
In 1957 electrical lighting was installed. In 2011, the visitor path was rebuilt in more than 600 hours of voluntary work. New LED lighting was also installed. This makes the Sontheimer Höhle one of the first caves in Germany and the first in the Swabian Alb to have such lighting installed. The average annual number of visitors in the years 2006 to 2010 is 3493 and 3024 for 2010.
geology
The cave, which consists of a series of halls, is entered through a twelve-meter high portal. The slope of the cave is directed uphill and leads to a depth of up to 31 meters. The course of the corridor is clearly linked to a gap . Also noteworthy about the cave are the tall chimneys. The frequent profile changes are noticeable. The stairs go down through smaller halls to the lowest point of the cave, the 20 meter high final hall. Up to a bottleneck, which is 70 meters from the entrance, the cave temperature is still influenced by the outside temperature, behind which there is a constant temperature of 7 ° C.
In the front part of the cave, Florian Heller found remains of the Pleistocene bat in 1929 . An Alemannic burial with twelve skeletons was found around 125 meters from the entrance during excavations by the Baden-Württemberg State Monuments Office . It is dated to the end of the third to the beginning of the fourth century.
Trivia
The episode The Secret of the Coffins of the series The Three ??? plays among other things in the Sontheimer Höhle.
See also
literature
- Hans Binder, Anke Luz, Hans Martin Luz: Show caves in Germany . Aegis Verlag, Ulm 1993, ISBN 3-87005-040-3 .
- Stephan Kempe: World full of secrets - caves . HB Verlags- und Vertriebs-Gesellschaft, 1997, ISBN 3-616-06739-1 (series: HB Bildatlas special edition).
