The Cango Caves sit in Precambrian limestone at the foot of the Swartberg range near Oudtshoorn in the Western Cape, and the principal cave is generally reckoned South Africa's finest. The system of tunnels and chambers runs over 4 km, and only about a quarter of that is open to visitors, who may go in only in groups with a guide.
People were using these caves long before anyone wrote about them. Cave paintings and artefacts show occupation through the Middle and Later Stone Ages, over a very long span of prehistory.
The modern rediscovery came in 1780, when a local farmer named Jacobus Van Zyl was lowered into the first chamber. It turned out to be as long as a football field, and it carries his name: Van Zyl Hall. A second chamber was found in 1792, and the caves became a popular place to visit almost immediately. Dr Andrew Smith came in 1829 and found a great deal to interest him, and in 1930 A. J. H. Goodwin of the University of Cape Town ran a test excavation that turned up stone artefacts and other cultural material.
Protection is written into law. The Cango Caves Ordinance of 1999 gave formal powers over the caves to what was then the Administrator of the Cape, and those powers now sit with local government.
Two tours run at intervals on most days. The Standard Tour takes an hour through the great chambers. The Adventure Tour takes an hour and a half and means crawling through narrow passages and climbing steep rock formations by the light of small lamps, which is a genuinely different proposition from a handrail and a paved path.
South Africa
See it on the map
This is remote ground. The closest other places on the map are a long way off.
