A few minutes drive from our Camping in in Ceriale, there are the Toirano’s Caves, an exceptional site ideal for a dip in prehistoric times.
Do you want to know more about this unique prehistoric settlement, with the largest cave bears cemetery in Europe?
Read on and discover a fantastic place to spend an unforgettable half day immersed in a distant past.
The Bàsura Cave is certainly the most spectacular. Some cavers of Toirano in 1950 discovered a series of internal rooms that follow a path of about 450 meters, marvelous for the richness and variety of natural concretions.
For millennia the cave was the site where the cave bear (Ursus spelaeus) spent his lethargy. A presence attested by a large number of bone remains, footprints on the ground and traces of nail on the walls.
Footprints, hands and knees testify to the presence of prehistoric man in the Bàsura Cave and the existence of numerous clay balls attached to the wall testify that men of the Upper Paleolithic, probably hunters, maybe used it for ritual purposes.
The Colombo Cave isn’t normally open to the public due to its great prehistoric interest and as well as the uniqueness of the archaeological evidence.
The excavations began at the end of the 19th Century and led to the discovery of testimonies of numerous phases of human occupation starting from about 300,000 years ago.
The studies still underway, are leading to significant contributions on the knowledge of the environment and its influence on the behavior of prehistoric populations in the area.
In the Santa Lucia Inferiore Cave, the walls are covered with thin aragonite crystals arranged curiously in flower and, in some large rooms, there are huge stalactites, also covered with crystals of aragonite.
The Santa Lucia Superiore Cave is known since the Middle Ages and houses in the front a Sanctuary dating back to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Behind the altar, the cavity extends with a straight corridor, on whose walls there are numerous inscriptions left by the pilgrims since the first centuries of life of the Sanctuary.
During the archaeological excavations carried out around 1960, stone tools were found attributed to Neanderthals during the last glacial period. Recent studies, however, allow us to suppose that the deeper layers brought to light may be even more remote, so it seems possible that the first visitor to the cave was the archaic Homo Sapiens.
A visit to the Caves of Toirano is a “must” for the joy of enthusiasts of history or simply to spend a day immersed in history and culture.
