Ledenika Cave

Worth a detour

The name means icy, and in the cold months ice really does form in the entrance chamber — the one time of year the cave earns it. The visitor route runs about three hundred metres through ten halls, the largest with a ceiling some fifteen metres up. It has been open to the public since 1961 and sits sixteen kilometres up the mountain road from Vratsa.

Story

Background

The cave was found around the start of the twentieth century and fitted out for visitors over the following decades, opening properly in 1961. The route threads a sequence of named chambers — the Antechamber, the Concert Hall, the White Hall, the Great Temple — through limestone laid down long before the Balkan range was pushed up, with the usual apparatus of stalactites, stalagmites and flowstone. In the late 1980s it was taking a hundred thousand visitors a year, which is a great many more than it takes now.

It lies inside Vrachanski Balkan Nature Park, whose directorate manages it, runs periodic clean-ups of the shafts nearby and monitors the bat colonies here and in neighbouring caves. That is the honest frame for a visit: it is a modest show cave in a spectacular setting, and the drive up from Vratsa through the Vratsata gorge is at least half the outing.

Go in winter if the ice matters to you and the road is clear; go in summer for the temperature, which is a relief when Vratsa is baking. Either way it is short, and you should pair it with something else in the park — the Borov Kamak waterfall trail, or the gorge itself.