14th Feb 2008 - P4 Castril

A Spanish treat for one of the regular UK members (Tom) who was making a visit to Andalucia, Alistair was making his 4th visit to the cave. We made our way down the dry stream bed to the well hidden cave entrance just marked by a small aluminium tag. After a few initial boulders a nice entrance chamber with bats. (see video) Stopping every few minutes to photograph some of the amazing formations, we made our way steadily through the large chambers, connected by climbs, short ladder pitches and the odd easy squeeze. The cave seems to follow a huge fault line, imagine yourself inside a Toblerone box with a slightly undersized Toblerone in it! The sloping side wall was an almost permanent feature, and sometimes you were forced up the to triangular roof by huge boulder collapses. even a few 100 metres into the cave there are tree roots coming into the cave, so it must stay close to the surface for quite a while.

formations in P4

There is evidence of their being pools or water a few metres deep in places, although perhaps not in the last couple of years, although it does get damper further into the cave. We turned back at the far end of Easy Street, with still several kms of cave beyond apparently. It would be an exciting projet to try and get into this cave at the far end and make a through trip, surely a possibility!

This trip certainly made up for a frustrating couple of hours spent earlier in the day wandering around a cold windswept hillside looking for another cave, and failing!

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