Devil's Throat Cave

Worth a detour

The Trigradska river leaves daylight here and drops forty-two metres into a chamber big enough to swallow a church — the highest underground waterfall in the Balkans, and loud enough that the guide gives up talking. You go in through a tunnel driven into the cliff and come out up 301 wet steps beside the water. Guided groups only, roughly hourly, about forty-five minutes. Cold, wet, and the steps are the whole exit.

Story

Background

The entrance is artificial. A tunnel was cut into the base of the highest cliff in the Trigrad gorge so that visitors could reach the hall the waterfall falls into without doing what the river does. The scale inside is difficult to photograph and easy to feel: a void of several tens of metres in every direction with a column of white water arriving at one end of it.

The river disappears here and comes back to the surface 530 metres further down the valley, underground the whole way. The name comes from the shape of the sinkhole above, which is not hard to read as a throat once somebody has pointed it out.

The practical part: you walk in level and leave by a staircase of 301 steps built alongside the roaring water, in spray and a permanent draught. Anyone who cannot manage the stairs is walked back out through the tunnel, so the visit is possible without them, but say so at the start rather than halfway up. Take a jacket regardless of the weather outside, and expect the commentary in Bulgarian with whatever English the guide happens to have. After heavy rain or snowmelt the cave can shut without notice.