This place is simply a brilliant creation of nature. It can be called one of the wonders of the world, striking in its grandeur and beauty. You can get to the cave only along a narrow path or along a winding dirt road, on which only SUVs pass.
This place is the Swallow Cave. Mexico is generally famous for its caves, but this wonderful place of untouched nature, accidentally discovered by base jumpers and cavers, attracts the attention of not only scientists, but also sports extreme people and tourists from all over the planet.
Swallow Cave, a bird's-eye view of it representing a huge hole in the thickets of tropical vegetation, is actually a very dangerous place. Its depth ranges from 333-376 meters. The entrance to it, as well as its bottom is sloping, there are many narrow passages to deep, not yet fully explored levels.
The Swallow Cave is commensurate in height with the most famous New York skyscraper, although visually it seems much smaller than in reality. Its shape is a truncated cone, gradually expanding to the bottom up to 160 meters. Getting down into the cave and getting out of it is very difficult. This is truly a test for even the most experienced athletes.
Its beautiful name Swallow Cave owes its colony of birds that once lived here. At one time, it was home to several million feathered individuals, but later their number decreased significantly, and today this place is inhabited mainly by swifts and Mexican parrots, which are attracted by a calm and quiet environment.
To prevent tourists from disturbing this peace, the local authorities issued a decree allowing visitors to visit the cave only four hours a day, when birds leave it for food. Since crowds of lovers of extreme descents come here, this solution protects not only the interests of birds, but also parachutists, who thus avoid collisions with flocks of birds during flight. Every day, huge flocks fly out from the depths of the cave, rapidly rising directly into the sky, and with the onset of darkness they come back, literally collapsing directly inside. This is simply an indescribable sight when flocks of birds in free fall rush right into the abyss, stopping only at their nests!
In the depths of this karst cave it is quite cold, so vegetation is observed only in its upper part. After the rains, which are not uncommon in central Mexico, streams form with waterfalls cascading down. The Swallow Cave at the bottom is covered with a thick layer of stones and bird droppings that have fallen from the sides, here, according to eyewitnesses, is full of snakes, insects and scorpions.
For many kilometers, the Swallow Cave is surrounded by a dense tropical forest in which oaks and ficus, strawberry trees grow. In the forest, you can often find tapirs and monkeys.
Being a unique ecosystem, the Swallow Cave has been known to man for a very long time, but over the past ten years it has literally become a kind of Mecca - a place of pilgrimage for researchers, cavers, and extreme people. And therefore, the villages surrounding it, previously engaged only in agriculture, today have a very developed infrastructure for tourism.
James Cameron was so attracted to the Cave of Swallows that it was here that he shot many shots of his film “Sanctum”.