The Limestone Coast is riddled with caves. We tour the best, from Naracoorte's fossil treasure to the sparkling chambers of Tantanoola.
The very name gives it away: this is a coast built on limestone, and limestone, given enough time and water, dissolves into caves. The Limestone Coast is honeycombed with them — fossil chambers, show caves, flooded shafts and collapsed sinkholes — and a handful are among the finest in the country.
The crown jewel is Naracoorte Caves, South Australia's only World Heritage site. Over half a million years, animals fell into the caves and were preserved, leaving one of the world's richest fossil records — giant marsupials, marsupial lions, even thylacines, now displayed at the Wonambi Fossil Centre. Guided tours explore decorated chambers like the Alexandra and Victoria Fossil caves, and in summer an infrared camera reveals thousands of bent-wing bats roosting deep in Bat Cave.
For pure sparkle, Tantanoola Cave near Millicent is hard to beat. A single, richly decorated chamber glitters with stalactites, flowstone and delicate helictites, formed in the wave-cut cliff of an ancient sea. It is also one of very few show caves in Australia accessible to wheelchairs and prams, with a sealed path throughout.
Beneath Mount Gambier itself, Engelbrecht Cave winds directly under the city streets, its crystal-clear flooded passages famous among cave divers. And not every cave stays hidden: the Umpherston Sinkhole is a cave whose roof collapsed long ago and which a Victorian-era gardener planted out into a terraced sunken garden, floodlit at night as possums emerge to feed.
Together they tell the story of the whole region — a landscape slowly carved from below by water moving through stone.
