31775 - 31779. Panoramic view of the road uphill to Škrip with the heaps of excavated material, called Galerija / Gallery. The side road which brings you immediately to the cave forks to the right just after the piles of rock.
Most images are approximately 683 x 1024 pixels in size, numbers in front of picture descriptions are serial numbers of the original photo files.
All pictures on this page photo and copyright (c) Primož Jakopin - Klok 2016.
The best reference for the cave / mine, located on the paved road from the northern coast of the island uphill to the village Škrip (or descending from Škrip to the sea),
is the dedicated web page (in Croatian)
of the Speleological Department of the Mountaineering Society "Željezničar" / Zagreb Railway Grotto. According to that source the underground object is 988 m long of which
314 m belongs to the Main tunnel. Denivelation from the entrance to the end of the cave is -41 m, it slowly descends towards the sea. The only correction the author could add
is that there is a nice trail to the cave which starts at the fence
which surrounds the entire compound, some 20 m from the paved road to side road junction. The cave was heavily transformed during nearly 200 years of mining,
from mid-18th century on. Yet it is a pleasant surprise, most of the
tunnels are easily passable, of standing height, it is a maze of passages where the colours of the walls and the ceiling vary from almost white to all the
shades of brown and terra rossa to black of the bituminized
dolomite layers, excavated during the exploitation of the mine. All
in all, a very nice underground object, and not difficult to get to.
For how long it will stay
this way is not a big question. General trend, not only in Croatia,
is to lock any still free underground object worth a visit, either to make it only
accessible for guided tours which take away 99%
of the caver's experience and excitement or to make it
accessible only to a handful of those who have the pleasure to enjoy the
privilege, knowing that it is denied to everybody else, in the name of science, nature
protection, visitor safety or some other nice-sounding excuse and pretext.
Here the fact that the cave is not closed seems to make perfect
sense. Lack of garbage in the cave, the only signs of
recent human presence are just a few survey markings, attest that not
only the compound fence does its job but also that
the visitors were environment friendly people, lovers of underground natural and technical heritage
who left nothing behind in the cave and only took home some
nice memories.
31775 - 31779. Panoramic view of the road uphill to Škrip with the heaps of excavated material, called Galerija / Gallery. The side road which brings you immediately to the cave forks to the right just after the piles of rock.
31750. The entrance, view in
31736. The pictures which follow were taken on the way back, from a point not more than some 100 m into the cave. In the picture: one of the scenes, typical for the Minjera tunnels - side walls built of excavated rocks, and the original cave ceiling
31739. Here the ceiling is bitumen-black.
31738. The largest hall in the first part of the cave - view in
31742. A daddy longlegs on the side wall
31743. Flowstone slowly grows over some of the excavated passages.
31745. View of one of the larger spaces in the cave, in all the hues of reddish-brown
31747. On the left side, just after the entrance a low tunnel forks off, partly flooded with about half a meter deep rain water.
The Main Brač Island Quarry at Pučišće and Its Stone, August 22
Breccia Caverns above Uvala Dutić, August 24
This page and the photos by Primož Jakopin;
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primoz jakopin guest arnes si (insert dots and at sign as appropriate).
Page initiated on August 28, 2016; date of last change August 31.
URL: http://www.jakopin.net/primoz/slike/2016/PJ20160823_en.php
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