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Reduced rates :
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Description of theEnvironment
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The Grotte de Clamouse is a living cave still being hollowed out by an underground river fed by rainwater and snowmelt filtering through from the chain of the Seranne hills and the southern Causse of the Larzac.
The site of Clamouse is the resurgence of the underground river which wells up into the cave during wet seasons and flows out into the Hérault via some fifteen springs; the main one of these, above the mill of Clamouse, can reach a rate of 10m3 per second.
The Grotte de Clamouse was discovered in the summer of 1945 when members of the Montpellier caving club led by Maurice Laurès crossed a dried-out sump.
Its total length is about 4km, and nearly 1km of it has been equipped for tourism since 1965.
The Grotte de Clamouse has two major features: the shape of the galleries formed by corrosion and dissolution which have cut deeply into the wall surfaces of the dolomitic rock; the abundance and variety of the concretions to which it owes its fame and which make it one of the most highly decorative of underground caves.
For the past twenty years, the Grotte de Clamouse has been the object of study and research by French and international scientists.
This involves dating the concretions with ages ranging from more than a million years to the present day, the ways the rock is hollowed out, the sources of the underground river water and the stages of the cave's evolution.
All the results obtained are constantly updated for the information of visitors in the exhibition room.
They are also used on the CD-ROM and the big-screen multimedia display of the geological history of the cave shown to visitors before the tour.
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