To date, 250 of them, located from Cape Tarkhankut to the Sea of Azov, have been studied by speleologists, put on the map and topographic surveys have been carried out.

What kind of life reigns in the caverns, what curious tourists can see there and what safety rules must be observed while visiting such extraordinary places for fun − all this was told at a press conference in the multimedia press center of Russia Today MIA.

Curiosity rules civilization

Today many diving centers offer tours of underwater life in Crimea. However, it is worth remembering that diving in grottoes requires special preparation, said Gennady Samokhin, president of the Russian Union of Speleologists.

According to him, there are at least 100 caverns along the coast of Crimea where tourists can be admitted. They are different:  you can walk into some of them and only dive into others, some of them are big and others are not so much. The longest underwater cavern is located on Cape Opuk – its length is about 300 meters.

The coastal grottoes of Balaklava and Cape Aya are especially popular with tourists. Many vacationers come by boat to the Yekaterina’s grotto, lovers of extreme sports like the Dragon's Breath grotto, which goes out of Balaclava to Cape Aya. In good weather, an unprepared swimmer can dive into it, but not farther than the narrowing, behind which there is a large grotto. You can dive into it only with an instructor and equipment.

"Half of the coastal caverns are located in the wave-surf zone – they are not flooded with water, the other half is under water. For speleodiving, you can use caverns on CapeTarkhankut, in Sudak, near the Swallow's Nest, on Cape Meganom. Theoretically, they can all be shown to tourists. But for this, it is necessary that the person who goes there with SCUBA has specific training for diving in caverns. This is one of the rather high levels in the hierarchy of learning. For those who do not know how to do this, it is recommended to better look and step aside," Samokhin stressed.

This year divers have opened a new cavern in Crimea. It is located at the foot of Mount Kara-Dag. The entrance to it is a few meters under water, under the so-called Mouse Grotto. A leading engineer of the Kovalevsky Institute of Biology of the South Seas, Russian Academy of Science, Maxim Kirin plunged into it.

"There is an air chamber there; it is small, but isolated. The sea waves in the cavern change the water level. And at some point, the fog began to appear and disappear. The air there was much warmer than outside. But there is no life there, only wet walls," he told.

Underground space

It is worth remembering that underground caverns are a world of unique organisms, many of which have not yet been studied. Scientists note that they are ready to take up the development of full-fledged excursions for tourists, in which they want to talk about this "underground space" and about the conditions for preserving this world. But to attain the proper level of development of this type of tourism, it is necessary to systematize and select those coastal grottoes that unprepared people can dive into (to look, take pictures, take selfies and go out), and those that can be visited only with an experienced guide.

"We are ready not just to show the crack – to go in and out of there, but also to tell what interesting organisms live there. We can show them and tell people, make them scientifically aware during a full-fledged excursion. Now this type of tourism is very much in demand. After all, there are unique inhabitants even on wrecks, as, for example, in an underground Balaclava submarine base there is a sunken fuselage of an airplane, where amazing underwater life develops," Samokhin stressed.

This can happen in natural caverns, he concluded.