Coves dels Hams

Pedro Caldentey Santandreu found the cave on 2 March 1905 while digging for onyx, and opened it to the public five years later, in 1910. Its name comes from the fishhook shape of its dripstone, technically helictites, and no one has ever fully explained why they curl and branch sideways instead of hanging straight down like ordinary stalactites. A trace of salt in the lake at the bottom of the cave shows it once connected out to the open sea, and blind, pale crustaceans that have lived in the dark water for generations still turn up along the route. The whole system is reckoned at around ten million years old, its dozen-odd galleries leading down to that lake, the Mar de Venecia.