The Grotte des Demoiselles is a story of a journey to the centre of the earth — one that begins, fittingly, with an astonishing ascent. Visitors climb some 54 metres aboard the first underground tourist funicular ever built in Europe, created when the cave opened to the public in 1931 and modernised several times since, yet keeping all its period charm. Sparing you 300 steps (which you can still descend on the way back, if you like), it offers a spectacular prelude: a few minutes along 160 metres of tunnel at a 36% gradient, just enough to prepare the mind for the subterranean adventure ahead. Halfway along, a life-sized reproduction of the cave bear Ursus Spelaeus — discovered in the cave's upper network during the first works in 1929 — surprises you from the left, before the electric mechanism reveals itself in a glass cabin at journey's end.
Long before the funicular, the only way in was the Aven — the natural shaft that served as the first chamber of exploration, open onto the Thaurac plateau. Countless archaeological traces show it was known and travelled since time immemorial: the first humans of the Languedoc, the legendary Petit Jean, outlaws of France's many wars and revolutions, and intrepid explorers all passed through here, braving their fear of the mysterious underground world — and long before any human ventured in, many animals made it their shelter. To visit the Grotte des Demoiselles is to walk in their footsteps.
The heart of it all is the cathedral. Your emotions speak first as you enter the fantastic hall of Notre-Dame-des-Demoiselles, so named because only a cathedral could match its grandeur: a 50-metre ceiling, 48 metres across, 120 metres in length — the dimensions of Notre-Dame de Paris, set 70 metres underground. The acoustics live up to the scale, and concerts are still given here, as midnight masses once were at Christmas. All around, immense organ pipes, gigantic draperies, and a wall of a thousand columns sculpted drop by drop over millions of years strike the eye at once, and the multitude of forms — uneasy gargoyles, dancing maidens, good-natured figurines — each tells a story you'll carry away. At its centre stands one of the most famous stalagmites in the history of geology, a concretion unique in the world: the immaculate calcite statue known as the "Virgin and Child."
The cave is a journey through three scales of time. It began some 200 million years ago, when the remains of corals and marine organisms in a warm, shallow sea formed the limestones of the Thaurac plateau; the cavity was later hollowed out by waters rising from the depths, and the concretions began forming less than a million years ago, after an underground lake disappeared — a process that continues today, responsible for the bright white summit of the Virgin and Child. Then came the human centuries. A refuge since the dawn of humanity — for Cévenol camisards during the wars of religion and for refractory priests during the Revolution — the cave drew its first scientific explorers in the 18th century: Benoît-Joseph Marsollier des Vivetières, who described the cathedral in 1780, and the illustrious speleologist Édouard-Alfred Martel, who first reached the cave's floor at 90 metres' depth in 1897, even using a hot-air balloon to measure the height of the great hall. Back then a visit was as sporting as it was perilous, lasting more than 14 hours.
And then there is the legend that gives the place its name. Long ago, a young shepherd called Petit Jean, searching for a lost ewe, slipped into the dark of the cave and tumbled into what seemed a palace of the abyss — an immense hall of a thousand glittering columns around which a host of fairies danced. He fainted at the vision and woke outside on the plateau among his flock, his ewe recovered. Who had carried him back? His tale spread through the region, and people began to call the place the "Bauma de las fadas, de las damaïselas" — in Occitan, the grotto of the fairies, or the Demoiselles. Even now that the cave has yielded so many of its geological secrets, you won't be able to help searching for those famous fairies in the calcite forms.
Climb aboard the funicular, then, and take your place in this prodigious adventure — a true marvel of the underground world, where every visitor becomes a new explorer, in the heart of the Hérault. Be the next.