d    a   r  g   i   l  a  n

                                                      
  VISIT

Being a visitor of Dargilan you're captured by the impressive dimensions and the variety of its  accentuated natural colored formations. The original entrance, discovered in 1880 by a shepherd who hunted a fox, does not annouce the importance of the rooms which await the visitor. This underground maze, revealed in 1888 by Edouard Alfred Martel and arranged the first time in 1890, made of Dargilan the first cave open to the public.

Dargilan, means diversity.

Once entered, an immense room with collapsed interlaced rocks of 60 meters, leaves you amazed. Here and there, in this chaos, scintillate many stalagmites of all sizes in stade of construction. On the huge vault a multitude of "soda straws" hang. On the south, a room of more reduced size but richly decorated, shelters a beautiful column. The visit continues in the bed of a anscient underground river with a succession of rooms as varied as sintered. Here, the waterdrops  depose its marks of calcite patiently. In this way, these marks are transformed into impressive columns of which the Bell-tower is the master piece. These formations flow along the walls and create huge or more delicate draperies (Elephant-ears, frozen waterfalls).

Dargilan, the pink cave on the Causse Noir.

A particular concentration of   iron-oxide and other organic matter gives in this part of the karst  a very varied colour to the formations. It's an astonishing succession of ocres, yellows, of saffron and pinks. As if,  being in full obscurity since its birth, the cave had dreamed about a real sunset.