The Statue of the Virgin
A natural limestone formation resembling a standing figure.
Marcin Grochowski — CC BY-SA 3.0 pl · Bernhard Wintersperger from Graz, Austria — CC BY 2.0 · Bernhard Wintersperger from Graz, Austria — CC BY 2.0 · Bernhard Wintersperger from Graz, Austria — CC BY 2.0
The best show cave in Istria, in the countryside near Poreč, and a **protected natural monument** since 1986. The tour descends **60 metres** underground through five successive chambers and takes about forty minutes. Each chamber has its own character: limestone columns, thin stone curtains the light passes through, the «**Statue of the Virgin**», a natural formation resembling a standing figure, and a chamber ending in a drop to an underground lake **132 metres** down that visitors do not reach. In the depths of the cave lives the **olm** — the blind white cave salamander found underground only in this part of Europe, which can live over a hundred years and fast for years at a time. Some are shown in a tank at the end of the tour. Note: **the cave holds a constant 14 degrees** all year — take a jacket even in August. Note: **tours are guided and run at set times**, and the stairway is long and can be wet.
A natural limestone formation resembling a standing figure.
A blind white salamander shown in a tank at the tour''s end.
Thin limestone sheets the light passes through.
Nova Vas, near Poreč — about 30 km north of Rovinj
An aquatic salamander that lives **only underground** in the caves of the western Balkans — Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia — and occurs in the wild nowhere else on Earth. Three things make it remarkable: it **has no eyes** (they atrophy under the skin, being useless in permanent darkness), it **has no pigment**, so it looks pale pink like human flesh — which is why local people once called it the «human fish» — and its **metabolism is astonishingly slow**: it can survive **more than ten years without food** and is estimated to live over a hundred years. ⚠ When it was first found in the seventeenth century people took it for a baby dragon washed out of the earth after rain.
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